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Class 

Book 

Gopyriglit"N°. 



CfiKffilGHT DEPOSIT. 




Saint John Baptist de la Salle 

1651-1719 






The Story of 
St. John Baptist de la Salle 

FOUNDER OF THE INSTITUTE OF 
THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS 



BY 



BROTHER LEO 



INTRODUCTION BY 
MOST REV. PATRICK J. HAYES, D.D. 

ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK 




NEW YORK 

P. J. KENEDY & SONS 

PUBLISHEBS TO THE HOLT APOSTOLIC SEE 

1931 



VlibU ®t)dtat: 

ARTHURUS J. SCANLAN, S.T.D. 
Censor Librorum 

ITmprimatut 

^ PATRITIUS J. HAYES, D.D. 

Archiepiscopus Neo-Eboracensia 

NeO'Eboraci 

die, 18 Aprilis, 1921 ---^^ A 4^ ^ 



u*^* 



COPYBIQHT, 1921, 

By p. J. Kenedy & SoNa 

FBINT£D m U. 8. ▲• 



JAN -7 1922 

0C!,A654151 , 









INTRODUCTION 

THIS well-told story of St. John Baptist de la 
SaUe is refreshing, intellectually and spiri- 
tually, coming, as it does, at a time when education is 
drifting steadily far away from its highest and 
holiest purpose, namely, the knowledge and love of 
God. Through the existing maze of false principle 
and unsound method in pedagogy, it should prove 
helpful to read and study the life of a Teacher Saint 
like that of the canonized Founder of the Brothers 
of the Christian Schools. 

Today, popular education, put by the State within 
the reach of all, is hailed as an accepted standard 
of modem progress and a pledge of civic liberty and 
of social welfare. If this be so, then our Saint was 
far in advance of his day and should be heralded a 
benefactor of the plain people, because of the entire 
consecration of himself to the training, religious and 
secular, of their children. 

St. John Baptist de la Salle did for the common 
school system among the people what St. Vincent de 
Paul wrought for the social betterment of the masses. 
The God-given birthright of the children of men, 
that is, the right and privilege of heavenly citizenship 
rather than the urge of social democracy, inspired 
these Saints of God to labor with zeal and success 
extraordinary among the wage-earners of their day, 

iii 



iv INTRODUCTION 

Our Saint made it possible for the sons of the 
toiler on farm and in shop to enjoy the opportunities 
of elementary, higher and technical schools — a bless- 
ing reserved generally to the children of the well-to- 
do. The course of study embraced the common 
branches of secular education together with a solid 
training in religious knowledge and piety. The 
complete thoroughness and soundness of the method 
turned out youth that was reverent towards God, 
dutiful to parents, and fitted for a useful life in the 
community. 

This was a revolutionary change in the school 
world in favor of the working classes. It will be the 
better understood, if we remember that our ideals 
and practices of democracy did not then obtain; in 
fact, they were not known to the people. Rigid 
social and class distinction was the recognized cus- 
tom, if not the law of the land. St. John Baptist 
de la Salle was of the aristocracy. Though close to 
the royal court, he knew that the^SUte of France 
was not necessarily the Slite of Christ. He knew 
also that the peasant and artisan, in the humble 
walks of life, could never move in the circle of royalty. 
Nor did he lament this privation. For he knew 
further that there was a king — Christ the Lord, 
and a queen — Mary Immaculate, and princes — the 
Angels and the Saints, to whom the children of 
the plough and of the hammer should be suffered 
to come that they might enter the banquet hall of 
the Eucharistic Lord and move in the courts of the 
God of Infinite love. To accomplish this was the 
mission of the Saint. 



INTRODUCTION y 

The extraordinary success our Saint achieved 
before his death has been carried on by the Religious 
Institute he founded, whose members are committed 
to the teaching of youth the world over, with a 
consecration that is as rai^e as it is inspiring, because 
of the spirit of faith and humility, of prayer and 
study that animates their own lives while they are 
moulding the character of others. 

This little volume is most readable and instruc- 
tive. The author's keen ilisight into the times of 
St. John Baptist de la Salle and the clear style that 
brightens nearly every page with quaint and modem 
phrase or with homely parable, should make the 
reading attractive to teachers and pupils, and to 
educators generally, who would know wherein is 
hidden the secret of true education. 

* Patrick J. Hayes, 
Archbishop of New York. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB PAGE 

I. A King and a Saint 1 

II. A Picture of the Age 9 

III. The Boyhood of a Saint 19 

IV. To THE Altar of God 27 

V. The Man from Rouen 35 

VI. The First Teachers 43 

VII. Gray Days and Gold 50 

VIII. A Cheerful Giver • . 57 

IX. The Torch-Bearers 65 

X. On to Paris 72 

XI. The Schools of the People 80 

XII. A Goodly Tree 89 

XIII. The Irish Boys 97 

XIV. The Making of a Brother 103 

XV. The Athlete of God Ill 

XVI. Pictures in Little 119 

XVII. The Gateway to Life 128 



vu 



The Story of 
St. John Baptist de la Salle 



CHAPTER I 
A KING AND A SAINT 

^^My brethren, God alone is great.^* 

THOSE WERE the opening words of one of 
the greatest funeral sermons ever preached. 
It was a great sermon, because the preacher was 
a famous orator. Father Massillon; and because 
the words were uttered over the mortal remains of 
one of earth's greatest kings. That king was 
Louis XIV, who had ruled for half a century over 
France, the king whom historians have called the 
Great King (le Grand Monarque) and whose power 
was recognized at home and abroad. It was a 
great sermon, too, because many of the great ones 
of the earth were there to listen to it — kings and 
queens and ambassadors, generals and admirals 
and statesmen — wearing costly mourning garments 
and flanked by numerous attendants. And the 
first words of that sermon are its greatest words, 

1 



2 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

because they contain the deepest and most impres- 
sive truth. 

That was more than two hundred years ago, in 
September, 1715. And four years later another man 
died. He was not a king, and the greatest preacher 
in France did not speak at his funeral. He died, 
not in a gorgeous palace, but in a plain, ill-lighted 
room; and the great ones of the earth did not 
come to follow his body to the grave. His remains 
were borne on the shoulders of men wearing the 
black habit of the Christian Brother; and along the 
streets the people — the plain people, the common 
people, the poor people — gathered with tears in 
their eyes and on their lips the words: "'The saint 
is dead! The saint is dead!'' That man was St. 
John Baptist de la Salle, the priest who founded 
the Institute of the Christian Schools. 

Those two men — the king and the saint — who 
died about the same time, at the beginning of the 
eighteenth century — were about as diflFerent in 
their lives and in their deaths as two men could well 
be. And in the eyes of the world — the world which 
looked only on the outside of things and was much 
impressed by pomp and glare — there could be no 
comparison between them. Louis XIV had feasted 
delicately and had gone about clad in magnificent 
attire and had waged mighty wars and had been 
surrounded by fawning courtiers and flatterers; 
St. de la Salle had eaten only the plainest food and 
had worn the humble priest's soutane, he had 
fought no enemies but sin and ignorance, and had 
been attended only by a few simple, holy men— 



A KING AND A SAINT 3 

the first Christian Brothers. To the eyes of the 
world Louis XIV was truly the Great King, and 
St. de la Salle was just a simple, zealous priest. 

In the eyes of God those two men were very 
different, too; but the difference was all the other 
way. For Louis XIV, though he had been careful 
about enhancing the glory of his kingdom, had 
been careless about saving his own soul; he had 
not been a good king like his great and holy prede- 
cessor, St. Louis, King Louis IX. The Great King 
had been a very selfish man, and had used his 
high place in life as a means of securing his own 
pleasure at the expense of his subjects; the country 
had been heavily taxed in order that no whim of 
his might be denied, and many Frenchmen gave 
their lives in wars that served only to add to the 
glory of the king. But, on the other hand, St. de 
la Salle lived his life in the belief that the soul is 
the only part of a man that really matters, that 
not all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
them are of any worth in comparison with one im- 
mortal soul. And so he had given away all that 
he possessed in order to labor for the salvation of 
souls, especially the souls of boys; and the army 
he organized and led into battle was not an army 
bent on conquest or on earthly fame, but an army 
of Christian teachers, destined to carry the flag of 
Christ and His Church throughout France and 
throughout all the world, bringing light to darkened 
minds and grace to sin-stained souls. 

In our day, even the world, looking at those two 
men, must doubt if the Great King was really 



4 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

as great as his admirers supposed; must conclude, 
indeed, that the humble priest who sought to bring 
faith and liberty to the minds of the young was far 
the greater man. There is a famous saying that has 
often been attributed to Louis XIV: ''I am the 
state.'' What did it mean? It meant that the king's 
word was law, that the king could do no wrong, that 
the king was the entire government of the people. 
"It is God's will," the Great King wrote in his mem- 
oirs, "that every one born a subject should obey the 
King without question." And less than a hundred 
years after the Great King's death came the terrible 
French Revolution, in which the people of the land 
rose up against the successors of Louis XIV and de- 
stroyed everything that the Great King had most 
esteemed. Where now were his military conquests 
and his fine garments and his lavish entertainments 
in the gardens at Versailles? The work of his hand 
had come to naught. 

But it was otherwise with the work of St. de la 
Salle. That work, though little noticed in the time 
of Louis XIV, has grown and grown until it is 
recognized everywhere as one of the best and biggest 
things in all the world. In the very year when 
King Louis was questioning the right of Our Holy 
Father, the Pope, to decide on Church affairs in 
France, St. de la Salle was laying the foundations 
of his Institute of the Christian Schools, a body of 
teachers destined to spread loyalty to the Church 
and to the Pope in every Christian land. 

Louis XIV was one of the richest of men and 
the richest of kings. Filled with vainglory and 



A KING AND A SAINT 5 

foolish ambition, he spent nearly two hundred 
million francs (forty millions of dollars in our 
money) trying to build an aqueduct from the River 
Eure to his palace at Versailles. He wished to 
leave behind him something to rival the famous 
aqueducts of ancient Rome. The Louvre in Paris 
was not palace enough for the Great King, so he con- 
structed at Versailles a dwelling place that cost some 
five hundred million francs — money that had to come 
from his oppressed subjects. In such ways the Great 
Monarch delighted to squander vast sums, while many 
of his people lacked enough food to keep them alive. 

St. de la Salle was one of the poorest of men and 
the poorest of priests. He came of a noble and 
wealthy family, but he freely gave away his inheri- 
tance to the poor of his native city; and in time of 
famine — and there were several famines during the 
reign of the Great King — he tasted the bitter pangs 
of want. Par from seeking a stylish place to live in, 
he gave up his fine family residence and went to 
live with the poor men who were the first Brothers; 
and he always chose the smallest and darkest room 
in the house. He had no thought of rivalling the 
deeds of the ancient Romans or of anybody else; 
his great object, his sole object, was to become 
more and more like Our Blessed Lord, Who was 
born in a cold stable and who through all His life had 
not whereon to lay His head. 

In the days when kings and queens ruled in the 
world and were much more plentiful than they are 
now, they often received credit for fine things and 
great things and good things with which they usually 



6 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

had little or nothing to do. Thus, Queen Elizabeth 
of England got almost all the glory of the defeat 
of the Spanish Armada, while in fact the victory 
was due to a storm which dispersed the Spanish 
ships. And so it was that Louis XIV won renown — 
and gave his name to a period in history — mainly 
because there arose during his reign famous captains 
and writers and statesmen and saints. The Great 
King did not have to build a kingdom or to establish 
a government; that work had been done in France 
before his time by great kings like Henry IV and 
great statesmen like Cardinal Richelieu. 

But it was very different with the work under- 
taken by St. de la Salle. He had to begin at the 
beginning. He had to find schools and teachers; 
and he had to interest wealthy people in the work 
in order that the schools might continue and the 
teachers might not starve. He had to overcome 
the opposition that always arises in this world when 
a great man attempts to do something unusual, 
especially if it is something good. He had to teach 
the teachers — a most important part of his work 
and something that until then had been almost 
entirely neglected. He had to write textbooks and 
organize free libraries and superintend Sunday 
schools and establish technical institutes and board- 
ing colleges. And the bulk of this work he had to do 
quite by himself; he had no capable and willing 
statesmen, as the Great King had, to do the work 
for him. And so St. de la Salle did the work, and 
did it all, and did it well; and he gave the glory of 
it to Almighty God. 



A KING AND A SAINT 7 

Even before his death the alleged greatness of 
King Louis XIV had begun to crumble and crack; 
not without reason might he murmur: "After me, 
the Deluge!" In his declining years the Great 
King saw his once powerful army routed by the 
Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim and Ramillies; 
and in the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, he was obliged 
to cede to England many of France's American 
possessions, including Acadia, the land of Long- 
fellow's " Evangeline/' Before his death he expressed 
regret for his pride and ambition which had brought 
affliction and misery to so many of his subjects, and 
with contrition he confessed his more personal sins. 
Let us hope that God, who is infinitely merciful, 
granted His plenteous forgiveness to that repentant 
old man of seventy-seven — the Great King trem- 
bling in the presence of Death, a greater king 
than he. 

But King Death had no terrors for St. de la Salle. 
To die meant for him but to go into the presence of 
his God whom he had loved so much and served so 
faithfully through sixty-eight years of life. His last 
days were cheered by the progress of the schools he 
had founded throughout France, by the growth in 
numbers and in holiness of the Brothers he had 
gathered together to teach the neglected boys and 
young men of town and country. He could leave this 
world eagerly, happily, as the saints always do, 
knowing that God had blessed his work and would 
preserve it and make it grow. His favorite motto 
was not, "I am the state"; it was the little prayer 
that to this day the pupils of the Brothers use when 



8 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

responding to roll call, "God be blessed!'' And his 
last words were these: "I adore in all things the 
will of God in my regard/' 

And so, of those two men who died in France 
two hundred years ago and more, it would seem that 
to-day the humble saint, and not the worldly king, 
is the greater hero and the greater man. Anyway, 
to be a saint is better than to be a king; for we could 
get along quite well without any kings at all, but 
we cannot get along without saints. There are 
always saints in the world, though often they are 
not thought to be saints; indeed, perhaps the 
greatest saints of all are the hidden saints whose 
holiness is known only to God. 

Now, this little book will help us to understand 
what a saint really is by telling us a few things 
about one. Already we are able to see that the 
Great King was not a saint and that the founder of 
the Brothers was a saint. And what was the essen- 
tial difference between them. f^ It was just this: That 
St. John Baptist de la Salle realized every day and 
every hour the truth of Father Massillon's words, 
*'God alone is great," while Louis XIV did not 
realize it until he lay on his death-bed. 



CHAPTER II 
A PICTURE OF THE AGE 

IF we are to understand rightly the life of a great 
man, we must know something of the age in 
which he lived. To evaluate the military genius of 
Hannibal we must have some conception of the 
geographical relations of Spain, Northern Africa 
and the Italian peninsula, and some realization of 
the daring and originality displayed by the great 
Carthaginian general in crossing the Alps with his 
cumbersome army and attacking Rome from the 
north. We could not well appreciate the achieve- 
ments of Columbus if we were ignorant of social 
and religious conditions in Italy, Portugal and Spain 
at the time in which he carried on his explorations. 
We should get a wrong idea of Washington if we 
neglected to learn how the colonies broke away from 
England, how the Continental Army was organized 
and equipped and how France came to the aid of the 
struggling Revolutionists. We might well make this 
a principle to guide us in the study of biography: // 
we do not know the times, we do not know the man. 
Now a saint, like every other great man, must be 
studied against the background of the time in which 
he lives. The saints in every age are much alike, 
because every saint loves God and his fellowman 
and is devoted to the Church and labors for the 

salvation of souls; but the saints in every age are 

9 



10 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

different, too, because social conditions are different, 
and different times in the world's history have 
different tendencies and different needs. Once 
there was a time in Europe when holy men used to 
go around collecting money to ransom captives; 
that is, to buy back men who had been taken away 
from their homes and made slaves. If those holy 
men were living in our country to-day they certainly 
would not be interested in ransoming captives, for 
there are no captives to ransom; but they might 
devote themselves to building hospitals and asylums 
or conducting clubs for workingmen or giving lectures 
to non-Catholics. The interior life of the saint is 
pretty much the same in every age, for it is a life 
of holiness and prayer; but the external life of the 
saint must differ according to the requirements of 
the age and the country in which he lives. 

And so, before we take up the life of St. John 
Baptist de la Salle and see in what ways he grew in 
holiness and what things he did for God and the 
Church, we must glance at the seventeenth century 
in France, the age and the country in which he 
labored at the work of God; we must try to find 
out how the people lived and thought and in what 
ways they were different from the people of our day. 
This chapter must be like a moving picture which 
shows us another country and another time; and, 
if we use our imaginations as we read, we shall be 
able to see what France was like, in city and in 
country, in the days when King Louis XIV held 
court at Versailles and St. John Baptist de la Salle 
conducted schools at Reims. 



A PICTURE OF THE AGE 11 

The first thing that we notice is that the social 
system was very different from ours. At all times 
and in every place there are, of course, several 
classes of people, such as the rich, the fairly rich, 
and the poor; the learned, the moderately learned, 
and the ignorant; those who work with their brains, 
those who work with their hands, and those who do 
not work at all. Such classes of people were in 
France in the days of St. de la Salle, just as they are 
in the United States in our own time. But there was 
then a class distinction which is not found among us, 
the distinction between the nobles and the common 
people, the aristocrats and the artisans or workmen. 

What was that distinction.^ Well, some men were 
born of noble families — their fathers and grandfathers 
and great-grandfathers had been called viscounts 
or marquises, or dukes — and so they were for that 
reason aristocrats; and they were thought, and 
they thought themselves, better and more important 
persons just on that account. The aristocrats 
might study or write or command a regiment in the 
king's army; but it was considered unworthy and 
imdignified for them to do any manual work or 
engage in business; and they always wore a certain 
kind of dress to distinguish them from the common 
people. And the common people were common 
people just because their ancestors were butchers or 
bakers or candlestick makers. Their duty was to 
honor the aristocrats and work for them and pay 
their bills; it was considered most improper for 
them to want to wear the silk stockings of the 
nobility or to be dissatisfied with their own station 



12 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

in life. When we understand all this we are able to 
see that St. John Baptist de la Salle, who came of 
a noble family, did a brave and heroic thing when he 
devoted his life to the education of the children of 
the common people. 

In two places only the nobles and the commoners 
met on relatively equal terms — in the church and in 
the street. The streets of the larger cities such as 
Paris or Reims or Rouen were winding and narrow, 
dusty in summer and muddy in winter, paved with 
irregular cobble-stones and lined by houses which 
often hung far out into the air. Modern ideas of 
supplying clean water and of disposing of dirty 
water were not known, and the visitor who insisted 
on walking about had need to be on his guard 
against cascades of soapsuds and showers of refuse 
from upper windows. The nearest approach to a 
sewer was an open trench dug along the middle of 
the street, in which dogs frisked and into which 
children slipped. Traffic policemen were not a 
seventeenth century institution, so the streets pre- 
sented a confusing and exciting spectacle with 
rearing horses, gilded coaches, squabbling servants, 
fruit venders shouting their wares and monks in their 
somber habits picking their way through the throng. 
At night the streets were dark, and respectable 
people never ventured forth. A law provided for a 
candle in every window, but nobody paid any atten- 
tion to it; and though King Louis did something in 
Paris to widen, clean and light the streets, in other 
French cities the night was, in more ways than one, 
dedicated to the powers of darkness. 



A PICTURE OF THE AGE 13 

But in the daytime, along the streets and in the 
shops on either side, the city dwellers who were not 
of the nobility went about their daily tasks. And 
what did they do? And could any man who wished 
to, be a tailor or a baker or a locksmith? Not at all. 
The tradesmen were banded together into guilds 
which were something like our modern labor unions, 
one difference being that in the guilds there were 
only a limited number of members, and applicants 
had to wait until vacancies occurred. If a young 
man wished to become a carpenter, for instance, he 
must first be accepted as an apprentice and work 
for several years without pay. Then, were a vacancy 
available, he would become a journeyman, and after 
several years more, again if there happened to be a 
vacancy — and usually there was not — he was ele- 
vated to the rank of master carpenter. But there 
were not many master tradesmen; and as they con- 
trolled the market, they were not anxious to have 
their numbers increased. The consequence of it 
all was that many a man who would have been glad 
to learn a trade was obliged to remain an unskilled 
laborer; and as there were thousands of unskilled 
laborers and very little for them to do, the cities 
were infested with beggars and pickpockets and 
sneak thieves, and the roads leading into the country 
were never free from prowling robbers. We know of 
two occasions when robbers set upon St. de la Salle, 
even though they knew him to be a priest. 

Of course many poor men, no matter how much 
they needed food and money, had too much respect 
for God and His law to do anything wrong, but 



14 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

earned a few trifling coins by running errands or 
holding horses or carrying parcels. The families of 
such men were miserable in the extreme. Often 
they dwelt huddled together in one small and ill 
ventilated room; sometimes they could get no 
shelter but the arch of a bridge or the uncovered 
roof of a seven-story house. We know for a fact 
that a little before the death of Louis XIV, in Rouen, 
a city with a population of seven hundred thousand, 
some six hundred and fifty thousand people had 
only straw bundles for beds. 

The common people in the country fared no 
better. The farmer did not own the ground he tilled. 
The farm was the property of the landed aristocrat 
who did no work but took a goodly share of the 
products. The king's officers taxed the peasantry 
again and again, for money was needed for the 
state, and the king and his nobles must be amused 
at Versailles. The privilege of collecting the taxes 
in country districts was sold at auction to the highest 
bidders. The newly made officials paid the money 
out of their own pockets, and then, with a license 
from the king to collect in the royal name, proceeded 
to make themselves rich at the expense of the country 
folks. Should the poor people have no money to 
give, the king's bailiffs seized the live stock and 
imprisoned the peasants. Then the women and 
children had to do the farm work; and even country 
priests were seen dragging the plow to keep their 
parishioners from starving. The peasants rarely 
tasted meat; and in famine years many of them 
subsisted on a bread made from ferns. To make 



A PICTURE OF THE AGE 15 

matters worse, the king's soldiers sometimes overran 
the country districts, commandeering whatever was 
worth the taking. 

Meanwhile life was gay and luxurious in the royal 
palace at Versailles. Ladies in ample gowns of silk 
and embroidery, and nobles in bright-colored clothes 
with lace at sleeve and knee, danced and feasted 
and sang the praises of the Great King. Thither 
artists came to show their skill, and philosophers 
to unfold their wisdom. The king was the state, 
he was the absolute ruler of his land; and so it was 
his policy to draw the nobles to Versailles, keep them 
amused, and prevent them from taking undue 
interest in the aflFairs of their hereditary estates. 
His police had the power to arrest any man, common 
or noble, on mere suspicion, to keep him in confine- 
ment as long as they wished, and to prevent him 
from having any communication with his family 
and friends. Under such circumstances he was a 
brave man indeed who defied the will of the sovereign 
and his favorites. 

And yet, that seventeenth century in which King 
Louis XIV reigned goes down in history as the 
Golden Age of France. Rarely, if ever, in the history 
of the world have so many great men lived at the 
same time. Lending radiance to the name of the 
Great King were military commanders like Conde, 
Turenne, and Vendome; architects like Mansard, 
Blondel and Perrault; painters like Poussin and 
Le Brun; dramatists like Corneille, Racine and 
Moliere; poets like Boileau; navigators like Du- 
quesne and Trouville, Immortal names are these, 



16 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

names that France and the world will never willingly 
forget; and even before the Great King's death they 
were recognized as immortal. The court of King 
Louis XIV was the one glittering point about which 
all Europe of the seventeenth century revolved, the 
center of refinement and elegance, of wit and wisdom, 
of fashion and art. 

And — save for some Protestants in the south of 
France, the Huguenots — France, both in town and 
in country, at court and in the provinces, was a 
Catholic land. Every noble family prided itself on 
having a son a priest, and every peasant mother 
cherished the hope that her boy might some day 
dedicate himself to God. The Church received 
every outward mark of honor and esteem. Splendid 
religious processions, fragrant with incense, bright 
with tapers, and melodic with sacred chants, trailed 
their glittering length along the crooked streets of 
the cities, and from the tiny village churches in the 
provinces the priest went solemnly forth to bless the 
harvest fields. Few men and women, even in high 
places, sought exemption from the fast of Lent, 
and to miss Mass was not only a sin but a disgrace. 

Nevertheless, both in town and country, many 
of the people were ignorant of the truths of salvation. 
Some of them went to church and said the public 
prayers without any very clear idea of what it all 
meant — just as an American boy might enjoy a 
holiday on the Fourth of July without much knowl- 
edge of the meaning of our national independence. 
The nobles in large numbers heard Mass, not on 
Sundays only, but every day, and in that they did 



A PICTURE OF THE AGE 17 

well; but many of their after hours were spent in 
sinful amusements. One lady, for a long time con- 
nected with the court of the king, was noted for her 
alms to the poor, for her visits to religious houses, 
for her acts of Christian mortification; and all the 
time she was living in open and shameless sin. The 
king himself had set the example of ignoring one of 
God's Commandments; his courtiers were only too 
willing to follow suit. 

But it must not be supposed that all the people, 
or even most of the people of France, were careless 
about their duties as Christians. On the contrary, 
there were many strong and fervent Catholics, 
many zealous priests, many prayerful monks and 
nuns, many women of noble birth distiuguished for 
their boundless charity toward the poor. Two of 
the glories of the reign of Louis XIV are the learned 
and devoted bishops, Bossuet and Fenelon, the 
one among the world's supreme orators, the other 
a writer whose fame will endure as long as the beau- 
tiful French language in which he wrote. Then, 
too, there was one of the most remarkable saints of 
the Catholic Church, St. Vincent de Paul, who 
labored so long and so faithfully among the poor in 
city and country, who founded an order of priests to 
give missions and an order of Sisters, the well known 
Daughters of Charity, to teach little children and 
to care for the sick. The Blessed Louise de Marillac, 
the co-foundress of the Daughters of Charity, placed 
her wealth and her talents at the service of the 
Church and labored for the poor and the unfortunate. 
The Blessed John Eudes, a saintly priest, devoted 



18 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

his long life to giving missions throughout France, 
to guiding and encouraging repentant sinners and 
to organizing and training young priests for parish 
work. 
And there was our own St. John Baptist de la Salle. 



CHAPTER III 
THE BOYHOOD OF A SAINT 

IT has been said that in four diflferent sections of 
the United States the inhabitants greet the 
stranger within their gates with four distinctive 
questions, the questions disclosing what qualities 
are most esteemed in the several localities. In New 
England, where learning is given special honor, the 
question is, "What do you know?" In the Eastern 
States, the center of the nation's business life, the 
query takes the form of, "How much have you 
got?" In the West, which is a relatively pioneer 
community, they ask, "What can you do?" And 
in the South, the section where a man's ancestry is 
felt to be a matter of prime importance, they tact- 
fully inquire, "Who are you?" 

In seventeenth century France the attitude was 
the Southern attitude; then, indeed, the supreme 
consideration was a man's family tree. If a man 
had noble ancestors, he was a noble; and to be a 
noble, to be an aristocrat, was the desirable thing. 
So it is not surprising to find the early biographers of 
St. John Baptist de la Salle laying much emphasis 
on the fact that the founder of the Brothers of the 
Christian Schools belonged to the illustrious house 
of de la Salle, which centuries before had come from 
Spain, and had been recognized among the French 
aristocracy since the year 1300. It was a family 

19 



20 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE^ JLA SALLE 

noted for its statesmen, its merchant princes and 
its fighting men; and its coat-of-arms recalled an 
old legend according to which an ancestor of the 
saint, also named John, had had both his legs broken 
in battle while fighting, in the ninth century, by 
the side of the Spanish monarch, Alfonso the 
Chaste. On his mother's side, the saint was de- 
scended from the Moets of Brouillet, another line 
of aristocrats, many of whom had reflected credit 
on the legal profession. 

Louis de la Salle, the saint's father, was a coun- 
sellor-at-law at Reims, and it was in that city that 
John Baptist was born, April 30, 1651. He was 
baptized on the very day of his birth in the Church 
of St. Hilary. He was the oldest child in a family of 
ten, of whom three died in infancy. 

We should like to know more about the early years 
of little John Baptist, the future saint who was 
destined to add more glory to the name of de la 
Salle than had any of his distinguished ancestors; 
but we are able to secure but a few glimpses of 
that boyhood which was the seedtime of his future 
greatness and holiness. The family, belonging as 
they did to the learned professional class, led a quiet, 
dignified life, and the boy was taught by his father 
the importance of walking and speaking and dressing 
properly and of observing the rules of etiquette at 
home and in the street, at study and at meals. 
The elder de la Salle was very fond of music and 
weekly recitals by the most eminent musicians of 
Reims were given in his house. He had his son 
take lessons at an early age; but the boy showed 



THE BOYHOOD OF A SAINT 21 

little liking for any harmonies save pious hymns 
and the official chants of the Church. His mother 
herself taught him to read; and, what is more 
important still, encouraged him to learn and say 
his prayers and to fear mortal sin as the greatest evil 
in all the world. 

An old song has it that "a boy's best friend is his 
mother"; which is doubtless true. But we must not 
forget that a boy's very good friend is his grand- 
mother. Little John Baptist's grandmother — ^his 
mother's mother — was the comrade of the boy when 
his father was in the courts and when his mother was 
busy superintending the servants in the great house; 
and this grandmother John Baptist loved during all 
his life. Many years later, when he had grown to be a 
man and a priest, and was so ill that nobody was 
allowed to see him, he heard that his grandmother 
had come to pay him a visit. Though hardly able 
to stand, he insisted on dressing himself and going 
down to the parlor in order not to disappoint the 
dear old friend and companion of his boyhood days. 

That his grandmother was truly the friend and 
companion of John Baptist we know from one inter- 
esting little story of his boyhood. One day his 
father and mother were giving a great feast in honor 
of friends of the family, and everybody was having 
a very enjoyable time. The age of King Louis XIV 
was an age of frequent festivities among the nobility, 
and all the guests made merry with the banquet and 
the music and the dancing. But little John Baptist 
did not like all the noise and confusion and strange 
faces, so he slipped over to his grandmother and 



22 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

drew her away from the merrymaking throng and 
asked her to read something for him. Of course she 
complied with his request — ^grandmothers always do; 
and so while the laughter and the music echoed from 
other parts of the house, the dear old lady and the 
little boy sat quietly in a retired room, bending 
over a book that is one of the most interesting 
books ever written, the Lives of the Saints. 

If we would learn to know and to like St. John Bap- 
tist de la Salle, we must hang that picture in the 
gallery of our memory, the picture of the little lad 
listening to the reading of the Lives of the Saints. 
Already he had discovered that that book is a 
wonderful, an absorbing book; he did not find it dull 
or dry or tiresome, because he liked to hear about 
the men and women who had done mighty things 
for God and His Holy Church. Already the little 
boy had discovered that the saints are true heroes 
and that their lives are full of thrills and excitement; 
that when the saints fought against sin and tempta- 
tion they were doing something more remarkable 
than soldiers who fight against human foes; that 
when the saints preached the Gospel or taught little 
children or cared for the sick they were doing some- 
thing greater than explorers and scientists and 
inventors do for mankind. 

Often we can tell from the favorite games of a 
boy what his true vocation in life is, what special 
talents he has, and what God wants him to do. 
When King Louis XIV was a little boy he liked 
above all things to play soldier, to make his com- 
panions march and engage in sham battles; and 



THE BOYHOOD OF A SAINT 23 

he never wanted anybody but himself to be the 
victorious general. His favorite game showed the 
bent of his mind. He was a bossy sort of boy; and 
he was a very bossy sort of king; and in 1678, after 
his victorious campaign in Holland, Louis XIV was 
acknowledged to have the most numerous, the best | 

drilled, and the best equipped army in Europe. ^ 

Little John Baptist de la Salle did not like to play 
soldier. But he did like to play priest, and often he 
would drape himself with pieces of cloth to represent 
the sacred vestments and with great solemnity go 
through the ceremonies of the Mass. This would 
have been wrong, of course, if he had intended to 
make fun of the holy sacrifice; but he was far from 
doing anything like that. His *' playing priest" 
simply showed that he was more interested in 
sacred things than in anything else, and that he liked 
to dream of himself as a minister of God standing 
before God's holy altar. Every boy has day-dreams 
of one sort or another — day-dreams in which he 
pictures himself doing the things he would like best 
to do; and happy are those boys, in our day and in 
every day, who have such clean and holy day-dreams 
as those of St. de la Salle. 

Reims was, and is, a wonderful city, its history 
dating back through many centuries, its streets alive 
with memories of the past; the city that has the 
great St. Remigius as its patron; the city whose 
massive Cathedral of Our Lady was one of the most 
beautiful pieces of architecture in the world; the 
city where St. Joan of Arc had her moment of glad 
triumph when King Charles was crowned. Saints 



24 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and scholars and statesmen, their fame heralded 
throughout France and the world, claimed Reims 
as their home city; and, because it stands so near 
the frontiers, soldiers time and again passed through 
its streets to the sound of inspiring music and the 
cheers of the populace. It was a city where a boy 
could find many things to see and many things to do, 
even though in those days little boys, especially the 
children of noble families, were not allowed as much 
liberty as American boys of corresponding age. 

When John Baptist was nine years of age he 
began to go to school. He was sent by his parents 
to what we should call to-day a preparatory school 
of the University of Reims, the College of Good 
Children. You will notice that in former years the 
word college was applied to schools which in our time 
would be called grammar schools or academies. 
Here he followed a nine years' course, learning, 
among other things, grammar, literature, poetry, 
rhetoric and philosophy. The school was con- 
ducted by priests, so a sound course in religion was 
provided and the students were taught^to be good 
as well as to be studious. Both boarders and day- 
students attended the classes; John Baptist was a 
day-student. 

We can picture the boy bidding a morning au 
revoir to his mother and grandmother and starting 
on his way to school. Since all his biographers tell 
us he was a thoroughly good boy and a model stu- 
dent, we are safe in assuming that he is not late for 
his classes, which began usually at eight and some- 
times earlier. He is dressed, according to the fash- 



THE BOYHOOD OF A SAINT 25 

ion of the day, in bright colored clothes of fine mate- 
rial — a plum-colored coat fitting close to the waist, 
the skirts falling over the thighs; light blue knick- 
erbockers, amply cut, and tied at the knee with a 
rosette of black or maroon; white silk stockings; low- 
cut, square-toed black shoes with silver buckles, and 
a heavy three-cornered hat of black felt ornamented 
in front with a bit of blue and silver ribbon. The 
school day was a long one, the classes generally 
continuing until five o'clock. The boy liked his 
studies and made rapid progress in them; and he 
never lost the habit of studying. All his life long, St. 
de la Salle was a student. 

But though he liked the College of Good Children, 
there was one place in the great city of Reims that 
little John Baptist liked even more. That was the 
Church of St. Hilary, whither his mother or his 
grandmother used to take him to vespers and to 
Mass. He loved to listen to the solemn chants of 
the Church, he was fascinated by the lights and 
the ceremonies, the odor of incense was sweet in his 
nostrils. And then one day he received permission to 
enroll himself among the altar boys and serve the 
priest at Mass. He was a very happy lad when for 
the first time he buttoned up his little black cassock, 
donned his white surplice, and took his place with 
the other servers. In the performance of his duties 
as altar boy he was most punctual and attentive. 
''He attracted," we are told, ''the attention of all 
the assistants and inspired all the beholders with 
devotion." 

This fleeting picture of St. John Baptist de la 



26 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

Salle as a boy may be disappointing to some of us 
who expect to find the boyhood of a saint different 
from the boyhood of other men. But if we have 
such expectations, we are wrong. As boys and as 
men the saints did not generally do such wonderful 
and unusual things; or, if they did, they are not 
saints on that account. No, they did the common, 
the usual, the ordinary things; but — and here is 
the secret of their sainthood — they did everything 
as well as they knew how. Not what we do, but 
how we do it — that is what makes us saints! 



CHAPTER IV 
TO THE ALTAR OF GOD 

WE are told in the Bible that the Prophet 
Samuel, when a little boy, heard the voice of 
God calling him by name. At first he thought the 
summons came from his master, the high priest, 
Heli; but when he was assured that the call was 
coming to him direct from Heaven, the lad promptly 
and whole-heartedly answered, ''Speak, Lord, for 
Thy servant heareth!" And then God told him 
what He wanted him to do. 

The call that came to Samuel is what is known as 
vocation — God asking the soul to do something for 
His honor and glory. It is a request, and not a com- 
mand; but those who really and truly love God are 
glad and happy to comply in all things with God's 
holy will. The saints have been saints largely 
because they have been attentive to the voice of 
God and eager to do anything and everything that 
God asks them to do. 

It is a fact which little John Baptist de la Salle 
must have learned when he listened to his grand- 
mother read the Lives of the Saints, that very many 
holy men received the call from God while they were 
still in their early youth. The Lives of the Saints 
contain many instances of vocation coming at an 
early age; and the Holy Scriptures tell us that those 
are blessed who have borne the yoke of the Lord 



28 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

from their youth. A boyhood spent in obedience to 
parents and devotion to duty is the best preparation 
for a call from God. For that call is like the seed 
which Our Lord spoke about in the Gospel. No 
matter how good the seed is in itself, it will not take 
root and grow and bear fruit if it falls in the road- 
way or on the rocks or among the thorns. It will 
be dried up or eaten by the birds of the air unless 
it falls on good ground. 

The soul of young de la Salle — that soul never 
stained by mortal sin — was good ground; and so, 
when the call came to him he was prompt to answer. 
Like the little Samuel he was ready to say, ''Speak, 
Lord, for Thy servant heareth!" His liking for the 
Lives of the Saints, his faithfulness to his studies, 
his habits of prompt and cheerful obedience, his 
interest in the ceremonies of the Church — all these 
things gave evidence of his fitness for a life dedicated 
to the service of God; and when he heard in his 
heart a still, small voice asking him to take upon his 
young shoulders the yoke of the Lord, he did not 
put off his decision. One day, when he was only 
eleven years old, he went to his father and said, 

*'My father, I wish to be a priest." 

His father, who was both wise and good, knew 
that it is very dangerous for parents to interfere, one 
way or the other, in the vocation of their children. 
He knew, as the poet Browning says, 

" 'Tis an awkward thing to play with souls, • 
And matter enough to save one's own." 

He knew that his boy was rather young to make a 



TO THE ALTAR OF GOD 29 

decision which would affect the whole course of his 
life; but, on the other hand, he knew that God often 
speaks to little ones and calls them in the flush of their 
youth to His holy service. In any case, he knew that 
many years must pass before John Baptist could be 
ordained sub-deacon, and that at any time previous 
to that event the boy might alter his decision if he 
wished. We may even suppose that the father 
would not be very much disappointed if the lad did 
change his mind, that, while he would be glad to see 
his son a zealous priest, he would not be sorry were 
the boy to remain in the world. 

For — and here is another thing about the seven- 
teenth century that we must not overlook — parents 
generally did not want their eldest son to become a 
priest or a religious. Every noble family was glad 
to have representatives among the clergy and in the 
great religious orders, but there were generally 
plenty of younger sons to answer the call of the 
Lord. It was a custom of the time for the eldest son 
to assist the father in the direction of the family, to 
take upon his shoulders the same professional cares 
and to uphold the honor of the family name. As a 
matter of fact, as we shall soon see, John Baptist's 
ordination was delayed on account of his family 
responsibilities. God was very good to the family of 
the de la Salles, for two of the saint's brothers 
became priests and one of his sisters became a nun. 

In the city of St. de la Salle's birth was a body of 
men known as canons. The canons, all either priests 
or candidates for the priesthood, wore a special 
costume, recited the Divine Office in the cathedral, 



30 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and led a life of stricter regularity than ordinary 
secular priests. It was considered a great honor to 
be chosen a canon. ^ 

When he was only fifteen years of age, that honor 
came to St. de la Salle. Canon Dozet, a relative of 
the de la Salles, had grown old, and the idea came 
to him of resigning his canonry in favor of some 
rightly disposed young man. He had known John 
Baptist from babyhood, had observed his youthful 
piety and purity of life, had applauded his wish to 
become a priest. He had noted, too, that the 
youth's name was listed among the honor students 
of the college. All this moved him to resign his seat 
among the canons in favor of de la Salle, and the 
young man was solemnly installed a Canon of Reims 
early in 1667. 

The saint now realized that his work of preparation 
for the holy priesthood must take two forms: He 
must become a learned man, and he must become a 
holy man. He continued his studies at the Univer- 
sity of Reims and received the degree of master of 
arts in 1669. He then entered on his course in 
theology at the university of his native city; but his 
father decided that for so brilliant and attentive a 
student the best was none too good, so he sent him 
to the celebrated school known as the Sorbonne, in 
Paris, where he had the privilege of studying under 
the ablest and most renowned teachers in France. 
He passed his final examinations in Reims and 
secured the degree of doctor in 1680. That degree 
was then, as it is to-day, the highest evidence of 
scholarship and research, and it secured for the 



TO THE ALTAR OF GOD 31 

founder of the Chlristian Brothers a place in the 
ranks of the learned. 

But St. de la Salle well knew that learning, though 
necessary for the priest, is not the only need. The 
priest is the ambassador of Christ, another Christ, 
whose responsibility it is to be an example in all 
things to the members of the flock of the Lord. He 
must be holy as well as learned, deep in prayer as well 
as in books, knowing the path of goodness not less than 
the path of lore. So he attended likewise another 
famous school in Paris, the seminary of St. Sulpice. 

The Sulpician Fathers are a body of priests, 
founded in the seventeenth century by Father Olier, 
who do a very special work in the Church. Every 
order makes some one thing the special end of its 
efforts. Thus, the Dominicans devote themselves 
especially to preaching, the Trappists to prayer and 
penance, the Paulists to giving missions to Catholics 
and to non-Catholics. But the Sulpicians do some- 
thing different still. They give their time and their 
energy and their learning to the training of priests, 
to the proper education of young men who feel 
called to the ecclesiastical state. Some of the most 
saintly and highly educated men the world has 
known in the last two hundred years were Sulpicians. 

The seminary of St. Sulpice was a school of sanc- 
tity; and there, in company with several young 
men who afterward became famous, notably Fenelon, 
the holy Archbishop of Cambrai, St. John Baptist 
de la Salle learned the science of the saints. Years 
afterward, the superior of the seminary wrote of 
him as follows: 



32 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

"His conversation was always gentle and becom- 
ing. He appeared to me never to have displeased 
any one, or to have drawn on himself any censure. 
When he came to Paris for his studies, I noticed 
that he had made marvelous progress in all the vir- 
tues.'' 

A great sorrow came to John Baptist in 1671, 
when his mother died at Reims. Holiness does not 
— or, at least, should not — freeze up the affection 
the saints have for their dear ones, and St. de la 
Salle loved tenderly the noble lady who had taught 
him so much and had helped to form his character. 
Though history tells us but little of Madame de la 
Salle, we know enough about her to realize that she 
was a fine type of the Christian mother, a queen in 
her household, the companion of her children, and 
an example to all in piety and devotion to duty. 
No great man — be he saint or artist or statesman — 
ever became great without the assistance of some 
woman; and in the case of St. de la Salle the woman 
was his loving and devoted mother. 

A year later the saint's father died. It would seem 
as though God, to try the young man's character 
and test his virtue, was giving him sorrow upon 
sorrow. Such has often been God's way with His 
chosen ones, that out of their trouble good may come 
and that after their sadness they may rejoice forever. 
Sorrow, as the Catholic poet, Francis Thompson, has 
finely said, is "but shade of His Hand, outstretched 
caressingly." 

The death of his father caused St. de la Salle to 
interrupt his studies, for he was the eldest son and it 



TO THE ALTAR OF GOD 33 

was necessary for him to take charge of his brothers 
and sisters, some of whom were still mere children. 
So he left his beloved St. Sulpice and returned to 
Reims and for six years acted as the administrator 
of the family. And here is another thing worthy of 
our attention; his holiness did not prevent his having 
an excellent head for business. He was prudent and 
capable in money matters as well as in family 
affairs. In this respect he reminds us of St. Teresa, 
who was at once the most eminent saint of her time, 
the greatest woman writer in the world, and the most 
efficient business manager in Spain. 

Doubts concerning his vocation to the priesthood 
came to him about this time, and for a while he 
wondered whether or not he was doing the right 
thing in persevering in his youthful intention of 
dedicating himself to God. It was most natural that 
the cares and worries incident to his business 
responsibilities should have had this effect on him. 
But he thought the matter out thoroughly, looking 
at it from every side; he prayed that he might learn 
and do the holy will of God, and he took the advice 
of competent friends and guides. The result was 
that his scruples disappeared and he saw, more 
clearly than ever before, that the call he had heard 
while still a little boy had really come from God. 
He now bent every energy and every talent in one 
direction: He was determined to be a priest and a 
very good one. 

Slowly and carefully he prepared himself for 
ordination. He felt, as he approached unto the altar 
of God, the truth of the holy words: "How terrible 



34 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

is this place! This is no other than the house of 
God and the gate of heaven." He remembered 
that some of the holiest men who ever lived trembled 
at the thought of the awful responsibilities and the 
sublime dignity of the Catholic priest; that the 
singing saint of Italy, Francis of Assisi, through 
humility refused to take the final step; and that 
St. Vincent de Paul had exclaimed: *'Had I known 
what a priest is, I should never have consented to 
become one." 

The happiest day in his long and troubled life 
was Holy Saturday, April 9, 1678, the sixth anni- 
versary of his father's death. On that day he was 
ordained a priest in the historic Cathedral of Reims 
and for the first time exercised the priest's most 
august function of changing the bread and wine into 
the Body and Blood of Our Blessed Lord. And his 
first Mass he oflFered in one of the cathedral chapels 
with intense devotion and fervor. 

From that blissful day the holy sacrifice of the 
Mass became and remained his one supreme con- 
solation. In the future years he never failed to 
celebrate daily, no matter how ill or weary he might 
be, or how far away from home. 

He had approached unto the altar of God; and 
God had given joy to his youth. 



CHAPTER V 
THE MAN FROM ROUEN 

WHEN the Most Blessed Virgin Mary was a 
little girl the time for the coming of the 
Redeemer, as indicated in the prophecies of the Old 
Testament, had almost arrived, and many a mother 
among the Hebrew people, and many a young girl 
who looked forward to motherhood as the glory of 
her earthly life, hoped against hope to become the 
mother of the Expected of the Nations. Because 
she was so pure of soul and bright of mind, Mary 
thought little of herself, and did not even dream 
that the great honor would come to her. But we 
may be sure that she prayed, and prayed earnestly, 
that the Messias might come, and that the world 
might be redeemed. Little did she think, as thus 
she prayed, that her prayers were hastening the 
season of her own seven sorrows and her own sur- 
passing glory as Mother of God. 

When St. John Baptist de la Salle was studying 
for the priesthood under the Sulpician Fathers he 
had joined a little society, composed of seminarians, 
the object of which was to pray that more Christian 
teachers might be given to the children of France. 
This society had been organized by a devout priest 
whose experience in the confessional and elsewhere 
had shown him that many sins might be prevented 
and many troubles removed and many lives made 

35 



36 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

pleasing to God, if only the teachers of boys and girls 
were wiser and better. And so he induced the young 
men at St. Sulpice to form themselves into an army 
of prayer to ask God to bless the land with good 
teachers and good schools. 

St. de la Salle little dreamed, when he prayed for 
the blessing of Christian education, that he himself 
would be the answer to the prayers, that already 
God had chosen him to be the founder of a society 
of teachers who would conduct Christian schools in 
France and throughout the world, that in the years 
to come he himself would be hailed as the patron 
saint of popular education and as an authority on the 
organization of schools and the training of teachers. 

For, although at a very early age John Baptist 
felt that God wanted him to be a priest, he had 
no idea whatever that God likewise wanted him to 
be an educator. All young men, even saints, some- 
times like to fancy themselves older and wiser and 
better, like to think of themselves as doing some- 
thing worth while in the world; and, doubtless, 
John Baptist had his little day-dreams, too. Per- 
haps he pictured himself as a priest laboring in the 
confessional reconciling sinners to God, or in the 
pulpit preaching impressive sermons, or in the 
streets of his native city visiting the poor and the 
sick; but certainly he never pictured himself teach- 
ing in a schoolroom. Yet it was to the schoolroom 
that God called him. 

At the time, after his father's death, that the 
saint was in Reims taking care of his younger 
brothers and preparing himself for ordination, he 



THE MAN FROM ROUEN 37 

had a friend and father confessor, named Nicholas 
Roland. This Father Roland was a saintly man 
who prayed and labored much in the interests of 
God. A work in which he was especially interested 
was the education of little girls. He had taken 
charge of some orphan girls and devoted much of 
his attention to teaching them the truths of holy 
religion and imparting to them instruction in such 
secular subjects as would be of value to them in 
after life. This work grew so fast that Father 
Roland could not carry it on himself, so he interested 
several ladies in the schools which he had founded. 
The number of his assistants increased, and after 
a while they banded themselves into a society which 
was directed by the zealous priest. They were really 
a community of teaching Sisters, and were known 
as the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. 

Father Roland was just in the prime of life, at the 
age of thirty-five, when he grew very sick, and only a 
few days after St. de la Salle had been ordained priest, 
the founder of the Sisters went to his heavenly reward. 
One of the last things he did before his death was 
to ask his young and fervent friend. Canon de la 
Salle, to take care of the Sisters and their schools. 
How could the young priest refuse this last request 
of a dying man? He promised his friend that he 
would look after the interests of the Community of 
the Holy Child Jesus and that he would superintend 
the educational work in which the nuns were engaged. 

And he was faithful to his promise. The ladies 
who taught in the schools founded by Father Roland 
were not yet officially recognized as religious teachers, 



38 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and so St. de la Salle undertook the difficult work 
of having them accepted as a teaching community 
by both Church and State. He used his tact and his 
knowledge of human nature, he appealed for assis- 
tance to influential family friends, he pleaded the 
cause of the Sisters before the city council; and 
presently he received the approbation of the Arch- 
bishop of Paris and a license or permission, known 
as letters patent, from King Louis XIV. 

In that way the work of the Community of the 
Holy Child Jesus was solidly established, Father 
Roland's life ambition was realized, and oppor- 
tunities for education were secured for the little girls 
of the city of Reims. 

Then, though St. John Baptist de la Salle con- 
tinued to interest himself in the schools started by 
Father Roland, the work of the teachers was now 
running smoothly, and he found time to devote 
himself almost entirely to his priestly duties and to 
his studies, for at this time he was still preparing 
to receive the doctor's cap. It never occurred to 
him that the promise he had made to his dying 
friend was the first step toward fulfilling the will of 
God in his own regard, that from now on he was 
destined to be an educator and a trainer of teachers, 
and that his life was to be devoted to the education of 
boys. Many years afterward the saint said, "Had I 
known what was in store for me, I think I should 
have given up the work." It is as true of saints, 
as of anybody else that, as Bulwer-Lytton has said, 
"The veil which covers the face of futurity was 
woven by the hand of mercy." 



THE MAN FROM ROUEN 39 

One day when St. de la Salle went to pay a visit 
to Father Roland's nuns, he met there a man, fifty- 
nine years old, travel-stained and weary, accom- 
panied by a lad of fourteen. The man's name was 
Adrian Nyel, and he had come to Reims to open a 
school for boys. He was to be principal and first 
class teacher, and the lad he brought with him was 
to be his assistant. Nyel had heard of the fine work 
done by the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, and of 
the capable direction which Canon de la Salle had 
given the schools; and so he wanted advice and 
assistance before starting his own educational work. 

But why had Nyel come to Reims .^ The answer 
to this question brings us to an interesting story. 
There lived in the city of Rouen a wealthy lady, 
a distant relative of St. de le Salle, whose name was 
Madame de Maillefer. She had led a life of idleness 
and vanity, and, like many great ladies of her time, 
expended vast sums of money on her clothes and 
her carriages, her gardens and her banquets. Though 
poor people were starving all around her, she gave 
them but little attention and sought only her own 
selfish pleasure. 

One day a beggar came to her and asked her for 
help. She told the poor man to go about his busi- 
ness; but he was so ill and weak that he could 
hardly stagger from the rich lady's door. Madame 
de Maillefer's coachman took the beggar into a 
stable to rest, and there he died. The mistress was 
very angry when she heard of the kind act of her 
servant, and after giving him a severe scolding, 
dismissed him from her service. As the coachman 



40 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

slowly left the room the lady threw an old cloak 
after him, telling him to bury the beggar in that. 

The beggar was duly buried; and that evening 
Madame de Maillefer was about to seat herself at 
table when she discovered something lying directly 
in front of her. It was the cloak which she had 
thrown after the coachman. Again she was very 
angry and she asked her servants for an explanation. 
They all professed to know nothing about the cloak, 
except that several of them were sure that it had 
been wrapped about the beggar's body before burial. 
To them and to her it looked as though the dead 
beggar had spurned the alms which the rich lady 
had so grudgingly given him; that since she had 
refused him a bit of bread in life, he declined to 
accept her cloak in death. 

Madame de Maillefer began to think about this, 
and day by day she came to see that she had been 
unkind to the poor man, and to many other poor 
people; that she had been mean and selfish and 
sinful. Gradually her entire life changed. She who 
had been so worldly and vain became religious and 
humble. She wore simple clothing, sold her expensive 
furniture and carriages, and devoted herself to the 
care of the poor and the sick. The remainder of her 
life was given to works of Christian charity, including 
the education of needy children. 

Madame de Maillefer gave much of her money to 
establish schools in Rouen; and after a time she 
desired to assist the poor children in other cities as 
well. She knew of the educational work conducted 
by Adrian Nyel, and so she promised to furnish 



THE MAN FROM ROUEN 41 

financial support to his school provided he would 
open one for the boys of Reims. That explains 
why Nyel came to Reims and why he carried a 
letter of introduction from Madame de Maillefer 
to her relative, Canon de la Salle. 

The unlooked for meeting of the saint and Adrian 
Nyel in the reception room of the Sisters of the 
Holy Child Jesus was the beginning of a long and 
fruitful comradeship between the two men, so differ- 
ent in training and disposition. In many respects 
one was the opposite of the other. Canon de la Salle 
was of the aristocracy; Nyel was of the people. 
One was a priest, the other a layman. One was 
highly educated, the other but very moderately so. 
St. de la Salle was of a cast of mind cautious, prudent, 
deliberate; Nyel was sanguine, impulsive, even head- 
strong; the canon was characterized by delicacy and 
refinement of manners; the teacher was brusque 
and common. St. de la Salle was not thirty years 
old; Adrian Nyel was almost sixty. 

Despite these differences of education, character, 
and outlook on life, God brought the two men 
together to serve His holy purpose, and from the 
first they liked each other immensely. Nyel, now 
that he had met and spoken with Canon de la Salle, 
felt that there would be no especial difficulties in 
establishing a school in Reims; and the saint was so 
captivated by the optimism and enthusiasm of the 
visitor that he insisted on taking him into his house 
as a guest. 

*'Come to me," said the saint to Nyel. ^'Visiting 
priests are in the habit of staying at my home; 



42 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and," he added, with a dehcate touch of humor 
impossible to resist, ''you look just like a country 
pastor." 

And so the man from Rouen and his boy assistant 
found themselves guests in the stately and aristo- 
cratic mansion of the de la Salles. The teacher had 
entered the home of the Canon of Reims. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE FIRST TEACHERS 

ADRIAN NYEL was the sort of man that people 
to-day would call a hustler. He liked to get 
results and get them right away, and while doing 
one thing he had his eye fixed on the next thing to do. 
He soon had several schools for boys established in 
Reims, and his one little assistant had been succeeded 
by a dozen or more teachers. Charitable people of 
the city began to interest themselves in educational 
work, and more than one wealthy lady gave money 
for the foundation of new schools. Nyel was 
delighted, and looked forward to a time when his 
schools would be established in other cities of 
France. Though an old man, this energetic founder 
of schools had a young man's fondness for dreaming 
dreams. 

St. de la Salle was more cautious. He must have 
been amused very often by his comrade's whirlwind 
activity and unquenchable cheerfulness, but he 
saw clearly that the work which so absorbed the 
time and attention of Adrian Nyel would burst like 
a bubble unless it were more rigidly organized and 
more carefully supervised. Though he recognized as 
completely as anybody the crying need for the 
schools, he did not like the rapidity with which they 
were being opened; for he recognized something 
else — something which Nyel had failed to take into 

43 



44 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

account. That something was the necessity of 
training the teachers. 

We shall never understand what St. de la Salle 
did in the field of education, the greatness of his 
sacrifices, or the high quality of his work, we shall 
never grasp the true significance of educational 
problems in the seventeenth century, unless we 
know the sort of men who did the bulk of elementary 
teaching in the days of Louis XIV. The Jesuits and 
other capable men conducted colleges and universi- 
ties, but those institutions were intended for the 
children of the nobility. Who did the teaching for 
the children of the people? 

Some devoted parish priests and their assistants 
were engaged in the schoolroom, but not many; 
for teaching is a task that requires practically all of 
a man's time, and the priest has other duties to 
perform. Candidates for the priesthood and uni- 
versity students, tiding themselves over a period of 
financial stringency, would keep school for a while, 
but they were unsatisfactory because they had no 
experience and no genuine love for their work. The 
schools were so poor and the pay given teachers was 
so low that a man usually would not take up teaching 
until he had found that he was unfitted for doing 
anything else. There are exceptions to every rule, 
but it may justly be said that, prior to the changes 
wrought by St. John Baptist de la Salle, the teachers 
in the elementary schools of France represented the 
survival of the unfittest. 

Indeed, anybody, provided he was recognized as 
knowing a little more than his pupils, was deemed 



THE FIRST TEACHERS 45 

worthy of being called schoolmaster. At Lyons 
the school was kept by a man who previously had 
kept a wine shop; elsewhere the ranks of teachers 
were made up even of jailbirds and undesirable 
citizens. A pious priest of the day complained that 
"the greatest number of schoolmistresses are igno- 
rant; among the schoolmasters there are heretics, 
impious men who have followed impious callings, 
and under whose guidance the young are in evident 
danger of being lost." In the face of this testimony 
we may agree that by no means the worst type of 
schoolmaster was the jolly-faced fiddler who on 
occasions would desert his pupils and their studies 
to go and discourse sweet music at a village wedding. 

The teachers gathered — Heaven knows where! — by 
Adrian Nyel in his efforts to open more and more 
classes in Reims and other places, were evidently 
not of the lowest class of pedagogues of the time; 
but, all the same, most of them were poor specimens. 
They were ignorant and uncouth, incapable of 
teaching anything in a really vital way, and unable 
to form in their pupils enlightened tastes and refined 
manners. Nyel accepted their services because they 
were the best teachers he could get; St. de la Salle 
felt that it was little short of criminal to open more 
schools until the teachers were themselves taught 
how to teach and how to live. 

The teachers often got on the nerves of the deli- 
cately brought up canon; but he pitied their help- 
lessness and did what he could to guide them in 
their work. And, with that attention to practical 
needs which many of the saints have evinced, he 



46 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

first of all thought about their stomachs. Though 
Nyel was doubtless doing his best, they were being 
poorly and inadequately fed. St. de la Salle, knowing 
that a teacher cannot afford to have an ill-nourished 
body, volunteered to supply the masters with food 
from his own house. The offer was gladly accepted, 
and thereafter twice a day a string of servants carried 
trays of food from the de la Salle kitchen to the 
humble abode of the schoolmasters. 

But the saint thought of more than the bodily 
comfort of the teachers. On every possible occasion 
he would visit their schools, observe how they 
taught, give them specimen lessons, and offer help- 
ful advice; and out of school hours he would often 
call them together and give them practical talks on 
teaching and on living. His great idea was to 
make them cultured men, in order that they might 
become capable teachers. He believed that the 
important thing about any teacher is not what 
subjects he teaches or in what grade nor how long 
he has been engaged in school work, but simply, 
what sort of man he is. And so he tried to make the 
teachers of Reims into learned and saintly and 
manly men. 

It was very hard work. Many of Adrian NyeFs 
recruits had had generation after generation of rude 
peasantry in their ancestry and they looked upon 
refined manners as something silly and womanish. 
They had no taste for study and no great liking for 
the acts of Christian devotion which the canon 
recommended them to perform. They knew so 
little, in short, that they needed somebody to be 



THE FIRST TEACHERS 47 

over them all the time to tell them what to do and 
how to do it. The educated man is able to make 
his own decisions and handle the details of his job; 
the ignorant man can do nothing without assistance, 
advice, and incessant supervision. 

Now, with all their good intentions and excellent 
dispositions, the schoolmasters were ignorant men, 
and for a great part of the day, as St. de la Salle 
regretfully observed, they were left very much to 
themselves. Nyel was away, somewhere or other, 
for long periods of time, and when he was at home 
with the masters his presence was often worse than 
his absence. For Nyel, though pious and fervent, 
was an old man, a tired old man; and he and the 
masters, nearly all very young men, naturally saw 
things differently. The result was misunderstanding 
and friction. 

All this St. de la Salle realized, and he perceived 
that unless something were done to educate the 
teachers more thoroughly and to direct them more 
tactfully and more regularly, the work of the schools 
would go to ruin. "If," he thought, "they could 
take their meals in my house with me, I could have 
them learn many things quickly and hold them 
happily together." 

The masters take their meals in his house! Yes, 
it was a noble project; but what an unbending of 
his aristocratic dignity! To one of his refined 
manners the prospect of seeing a dozen uncouth 
young men violating the rules of table etiquette and 
giving other evidences of lack of breeding was really 
a cause of suflfering. But the good in the idea 



48 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

outweighed the inconvenience and annoyance, and 
so he extended the invitation, which was promptly 
accepted. While the teachers were with him he 
utilized every moment to form them in politeness 
and piety, and to give them a relish for the things 
of the mind; and a few weeks saw his labors blessed 
with excellent results. 

Then one day — it was in Holy Week, 1681 — ^Nyel 
went on a journey somewhat longer than usual, and 
St. de la Salle found it necessary to take charge of 
the group of teachers during the absence of the ener- 
getic head of the house. The good effects of his 
week's visit with them were so marked that the 
young men were frankly delighted, and even Nyel 
had to compliment them when he managed to rush 
back from Guise. This impressed St. de la Salle 
very much, and the thought came to him: "If I 
am able to do so much with the masters in one week, 
what might I not accomplish if I brought them into 
my own house and had them living with me always? '' 

This thought occupied his mind for a long, long 
time. He saw that it was the best thing that could 
happen to the teachers; but what about himself? 
Would he be justified in extending hospitality to 
those ill-mannered and imlearned peasants? Their 
coarse ways repulsed him at table; what would be 
the state of affairs if he had to tolerate their com- 
pany not only at meals but throughout the live-long 
day? His hesitancy can be appreciated only by 
those who know what a gulf there was between the 
classes and the masses in seventeenth century France. 

St. de la Salle would have liked to turn in his per- 



THE FIRST TEACHERS 49 

plexity to his deceased friend, Father Roland; that 
being impossible, he went to Paris to see another holy 
priest. This man was Father Barre. After St. de la 
Salle had told how he had been led, almost against 
his will and certainly against his inclinations, into 
the work of the schools, after he had described the 
plans he was following for the training of the masters 
and the project of taking them to live with him — a 
project which made him tremble with disgust and 
yet which persisted in staying before his mind — 
Father Barre told him that the school work was 
manifestly God's work, and that it was surely God's 
will that Canon de la Salle should carry it to its 
destined success. "'Therefore," he said, "do what 
your heart prompts you to do — what God tells you 
to do. Take the masters into your house. You will 
be criticised for it, and your motives will be mis- 
understood. But remember that the grandest 
designs of God are achieved only through con- 
tradictions." 

And so, on the feast of his holy patron, St. John 
the Baptist, June 24, 1681, St. de la Salle took the 
lowly teachers under his ancestral roof. 



CHAPTER VII 
GRAY DAYS AND GOLD 

ST. DE LA SALLE did a brave and heroic thing 
when he yielded to what was clearly the will of 
God and took the schoolmasters to live with him in 
his own house. And God, who dearly loves generous 
souls, promptly rewarded him for it. Having the 
teachers close to him day after day, the saint was 
able to advise and encourage them in their work, to 
teach them the things it was so necessary that they 
should know, and to form them to habits of scholar- 
ship and devotion. As the farmer, after the toil of 
ploughing the land and sowing the seed, enjoys the 
vision of the first tender shoots of grain peeping out 
of the earth, so St. de la Salle, after suffering incon- 
venience and annoyance by reason of the presence 
of the rude young teachers, now rejoiced to see them 
becoming more like gentlemen in manners and more 
successful and interested in the work of the schools. 
But his troubles were not yet over; really, they 
had only begun. For long his aristocratic relatives 
and friends had been shaking their heads over the 
amount of time he had devoted to Adrian Nyel and 
his school-teachers. Now and again protests were 
openly made to the saint. It was all very well, he 
was told, to have some interest in the education of 
poor boys and to be kind to the men who did the 
teaching; but there was a limit to everything. If 

50 



GRAY DAYS AND GOLD 51 

any priest was to spend most of his time with the 
schools and the teachers, it should be some simple 
parish priest who himself had sprung from the 
people; not the scion of a noble family, a canon of 
the cathedral and a doctor of the university. And 
when he went so far as to have the masters take 
their meals at his table he was told, rather pointedly, 
that he was carrying his charity altogether too far, 
and that he should have more regard for the feelings 
of his younger brothers than to permit the upstart 
teachers to fraternize with his own kith and kin. 
If class distinctions were to be ignored, if men like 
Canon de la Salle did not draw a line somewhere 
between the nobles and the commoners, what on 
earth was the world coming to? 

But a real storm broke out when the news began 
to spread — and such news always spreads fast — that 
Canon de la Salle had actually asked the school- 
teachers to come, bag and baggage, to live in his 
ancestral home. A committee of his relatives bore 
down upon him with a great smoke of indignation 
and a strong volley of remonstrances. What was he 
thinking about .^^ Had he lost his senses.'^ Had he 
no feeling for his dear, dead mother, no respect for 
the memory of his noble father? Had he no sense of 
his own dignity as priest and canon and doctor? 
It was wrong; it was shameful! What did he mean 
by giving his time and his money and his companion- 
ship to this gang of boorish fellows who had neither 
birth nor breeding, and who, for aught he knew, 
might steal the furniture and the family jewels and 
decamp over night? 



52 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

To the members of his family who thus sought to 
have him turn the teachers out of his house, St. 
de la Salle did not offer any explanations. He knew 
they could not, or would not, understand. He 
knew that his relatives were so blinded by pride of 
birth and so befogged by class prejudice as to be 
incapable of appreciating his motives. But he 
received them courteously, gentleman that he was, 
and listened to them kindly and patiently, sitting 
quite at his ease and with his arms folded across his 
breast. And when they had said their say and 
flounced out of the door, he went calmly back to his 
work of teaching the masters. 

The schools in Reims were now in a flourishing con- 
dition and crowds of boys were being taught, and 
taught well, by Adrian Nyel's recruits. As for Nyel 
himself, about this time he disappears forever from 
the story of St. de la Salle's life and works. Delighted 
with the progress in learning and sanctity made by 
the teachers, overjoyed at the sight of the hordes of 
children flocking to the schools, Nyel, who was first, 
last and all the time an educational pioneer, left 
the work entirely in the hands of the saint, and 
betook himself to pastures new. Not long afterward 
he died at Rouen, happily — and, we are almost 
tempted to say, energetically — to the last intent on 
opening new schools. He had been the human instru- 
ment chosen by Almighty God to force the problems 
of education into the reluctant hands of Canon de la 
Salle; and now that the saint was identified with 
those problems and so successfully solving them, 
Nyel was no longer needed. A good man and true 



GRAY DAYS AND GOLD 53 

was Adrian Nyel, and his memory will always be 
cherished by the children of de la Salle. 

A school well taught is always its own best adver- 
tisement. So it was not long before the success of 
Canon de la Salle's masters, as they now came to be 
called, spread beyond the confines of Reims, and 
other cities sought to have schools conducted by 
these unusually well-trained teachers. The saint 
believed in making haste slowly; he determined not 
to open schools until he had his teachers sufficiently 
well prepared to teach properly. The work of 
preparation went on steadily, and after a few months 
he was able to begin foundations in several cities. 

One of his letters, promising to send teachers to 
Chateau-Porcien, has been preserved; in it he dis- 
closes the grace of the gentleman, the practical 
outlook of the educator, and the piety of the saint: 

"Even were I to take but little interest in the 
glory of God, I should be very hard-hearted not to 
be touched by the earnest entreaties of your dean 
and by the courteous manner in which you have 
addressed me. I should be very wrong, gentlemen, 
not to send you teachers from our community, seeing 
your eagerness and ardor to provide Christian 
instruction and education for your children. Rest 
assured, then, that I have nothing more at heart 
than to second your good intentions in this matter 
and that, next Saturday, I shall send you two 
teachers to begin the school on the day following 
the feast of St. Peter. I hope you will be pleased 
with them/' 

But a new trial speedily came to the saint, this 
time from the teachers themselves. It is a sad truth 



54 ST, JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

of human nature that under kind treatment some 
men become restless and insolent. Such was the 
case with most of the young teachers now enjoying 
the hospitality of Canon de la Salle. 

He had taken them almost literally out of the 
streets, had sheltered them beneath his own roof, 
had given them better food than they had ever tasted 
before in their miserable lives. He had lavished on 
them, despite his repugnance at their coarseness, his 
care, his instruction, his advice, and his friendship. 
He had made them better men and better teachers 
and more useful members of society. Through his 
efforts they had attained more respect in the eyes of 
the public than elementary teachers had ever won. 
They should have been very happy, very earnest and 
very grateful. 

But, as the wise old proverb has it, "You cannot 
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Almost 
without exception the masters were crude and 
common; and though at first the saint's kindness 
won from them a measure of regard, they presently 
revealed the lowness of their origin and the uncouth- 
ness of their manners by ignoring the unceasing 
solicitude of their director, by imposing upon his 
gentleness and courtesy, and by planning to turn 
the educational and cultural opportunities he was 
giving them to their own selfish advantage. In 
brief, now that they were better able to conduct 
schools than other men engaged in that work, they 
thought of the money they might be able to demand, 
and the relatively easeful life they might enjoy; and 
so all but two of them left the community and went 



GRAY DAYS AND GOLD 55 

forth to seek their fortunes. Thus the fatherly care 
bestowed upon them by the saint they repaid with 
ingratitude and desertion. 

Let us, however, not misunderstand their position; 
let us try to be just to them, at least. They had no 
religious vows and they were free to go if they 
wished; but among refined and intelligent and well- 
bred men there are certain higher obligations, not 
nominated in the bond, not matters of law or vow, 
which in honor and decency demand respect. ^*A11 
things are lawful to me," says St. Paul, ^'but all 
things are not expedient." Those first masters of 
St. de la Salle were too ignorant and too rude to 
appreciate what the saint had done for them, and 
too thick-skinned to feel the unexpressed obligations 
of a gentleman. 

Our Blessed Lord Himself suffered keenly from 
ingratitude; so St. de la Salle, who day by day was 
learning more and more to follow in the footsteps of 
His Master, bore this biting sorrow in silence. His 
teaching staflf was perilously diminished, and the 
training-school for teachers had reached almost the 
vanishing point; but he did not despair. He knew 
that if this were not God's work it deserved to 
perish, and that if it was indeed God's work God 
would not let it pass away. 

And his faith was justified. For as the deserters, 
in ones and twos, shambled from his door, other 
young men came, almost miraculously, to take their 
places. And this second crop of Christian teachers 
was of a finer vintage. Many of them had a fairly 
good education; others were of better families. 



56 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

Several of them, originally intending to study for the 
priesthood or the law, decided to join in the work of 
the noble canon, for the eyes of youth always shine 
at sight of the heroic, and St. de la Salle, in devoting 
himself to the cause of the Christian schools, was 
doing an eminently heroic thing. So the saint's 
house was once more filled with prospective teachers, 
the gaps in the little army of education were filled; 
and day by day the recruits, under the direction of a 
wise and sympathetic commander, were learning the 
use of the weapons wielded by scholars and by saints. 



CHAPTER VIII 
A CHEERFUL GIVER 

MANY years before, when St. John Baptist de 
la Salle was a little boy and listened to his dear 
grandmother read the Lives of the Saints, he dis- 
covered that the holy men and women whom his 
boyish mind so much admired were noted for two 
important qualities. How much they might differ 
in age and occupation, in country and education, 
in intelligence and general ability, they were all 
alike distinguished for the spirit of prayer and the 
spirit of generosity. The saints were experts or 
specialists when it came to talking with God; and 
they were open-handed when it came to giving up 
things for the sake of God. And so God listened to 
their prayers and blessed their generosity; and so 
they became saints. 

All his life long St. John Baptist de la Salle loved 
to pray, for in prayer, in conversation with God, he 
found strength and refreshment and the sweetest 
delight. But he understood what generosity meant, 
too; and in this chapter we shall see how he drew 
down the blessing of God on the work of the Christian 
Schools by gladly giving up everything that he could 
possibly give. This chapter is a chapter of sacrifice. 

It is true everywhere in the world that everything 
has its price; that if a man wants to own a house or 
an automobile or to enjoy a trip to the mountains or 

57 



58 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

the seashore, he has to pay for it. For such things 
he pays in money. But for the things of the mind 
he pays in time and energy; a man can become a 
great historical scholar, for instance, only by study- 
ing earnestly hour after hour, day after day. The 
same law holds good in the life of the soul. If a 
man wants to gain virtue and merit, if he wants to 
grow more and more like to God and do great things 
for God, if, in short, he wants to become a saint, he 
likewise has to pay for it. And he pays, not in 
money, nor even in study; he pays by sacrifice. Sacri- 
fice is the coin of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

St. Peter, the chief of the Apostles, once said to 
Our Blessed Lord: "Behold, we have left all things 
and have followed Thee." As a matter of fact, St. 
Peter had not really given up so very much. He was 
a poor man and about all he had to leave behind him 
was a weather-beaten boat with a few old fishing 
nets. But Our Lord blessed his sacrifice and prom- 
ised him a measureless reward, because, though he 
hadn't given up much, yet he had cheerfully given 
all he had. St. Peter understood the spirit of sacrifice 
not less than the spirit of prayer. 

Just one year to the day after the school-teachers 
had moved into the de la Salle mansion, they moved 
out again; and this time the saint went with them. 
He had found that the mansion, though a fine 
place for a family to live in, was not suited to the 
work of teaching the masters to pray and to study 
and to teach. There were too many distractions, too 
many annoyances; and after a while there was lack 
of room. So he secured a plain, large house in New 



A CHEERFUL GIVER 59 

Street and there set up his httle community of 
instructors. And he feft his own house, the home 
of his ancestors, never more to return. 

That was one step toward his supreme sacrifice. 
Only a man very generous with Almighty God could 
have done what St. John Baptist de la Salle did on 
that St. John's day of 1682. Let us consider what it 
meant. It meant that he, the priest of gentle birth 
and high education and brilliant prospects, attached 
himself to the society of men far beneath him in 
family, in breeding, and in accomplishments. It 
meant that he cut himself off from the delights of 
familiar intercourse with his own brothers and sisters 
and from the numerous family reunions which many 
of his relatives were accustomed to enjoy in his 
house. It meant that he renounced all the sweet and 
tender memories which the house itself contained, 
the souvenirs of his boyhood days, the antique 
furniture and decorations, the gleaming silver and 
sparkling crystal, the portraits and paintings beyond 
price. 

We Americans are prone to underestimate the 
greatness of this sacrifice so cheerfully made by St. 
de la Salle, for home meant more to a man in France 
in the seventeenth century than we can readily 
understand. It may be said that in one sense we in 
this country have no homes at all. At least we are 
always changing our homes. We move from city to 
city, from state to state; and many a man does not 
know, and does not especially care, what has become 
of the house in which he was born. Many of our 
people live in a succession of rented apartments; 



60 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

the popular song-writer stated a truth when he 
defined home, in the American sense of the word, as 
any place where a man hangs his hat. It is vastly 
different in France. Generally the one house remains 
the center of the family life for generation after gen- 
eration, and it becomes a sacred place, dearer to its 
owners than anything else in the wide world. The 
feeling for home, so strong even now in France, was 
stronger in the seventeenth century; and it must 
have been especially strong in the heart of a man so 
tender and sympathetic as the founder of the Chris- 
tian Brothers. For him to give up his home forever 
was a sacrifice indeed. 

But more still did God demand of him, and more 
did he generously give. Now that he had devoted 
himself so wholeheartedly to the labors of the 
schools, of what use to him was the title of Canon of 
Reims? To be a canon was a great honor, a great 
dignity; but the oflSce interfered with his plans for 
the formation of his teachers, and made heavy 
inroads on the time he wished to devote to instruc- 
tion and supervision. Accordingly, he resigned his 
canonry in 1683. 

Naturally his family protested when they heard of 
his thus throwing away an oflBce of so much distinc- 
tion; but they were not very much surprised. They 
had come to expect almost anything in the way of 
self-denial from the saint when the interests of his 
schools were at stake. Besides, they remembered 
that years before — ^prior to his ordination, in fact — 
he had wished to resign from the canonry in order to 
become a simple parish priest, and that he was pre- 



A CHEERFUL GIVER 61 

vented from taking the step only by the refusal of his 
bishop to grant the necessary permission. Now that 
he had succeeded in getting rid of the honor, said 
his relatives, he would at least show some family 
feeling by naming his brother Louis, also a priest, to 
succeed him. But St. de la Salle did no such thing. 
He determined to allow no natural affection to guide 
him in the choice of a successor, and therefore nomi- 
nated, not Louis de la Salle, but an obscure and 
devout priest who came of a humble family. The 
result was another storm of disapprobation from the 
saint's relatives; but the saint was getting used to 
storms. 

And now St. John Baptist de la Salle was ready to 
take the final step in self-renunciation, to prove his 
generosity to God, to be in a position to say with the 
fisherman of Galilee, "Behold, we have left all things 
and have followed Thee." 

As the eldest son of the de la Salle family, he had 
become, on the death of his father, a very wealthy 
man. Then as now, the possession of money confers 
distinction, and the citizens of Reims respected and 
honored the priest who had shown himself skilled in 
the management of financial affairs. His inheritance 
gave him an advantage in dealing with the world 
and in taking care of his teachers; he was able to 
secure them adequate shelter, and nourishing food, 
and proper nursing in sickness. But his money was a 
drawback, too. 

For several months he had been impressing his 
followers, the teachers in the Christian schools, with 
the idea of giving themselves wholly to the splendid 



62 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

work in which they were engaged. He pointed out 
to them the desirabihty of their offering themselves 
to conduct free schools as a society of Christian 
teachers and of trusting to the goodness of God to 
supply their temporal needs. But he found them slow 
to respond to his appeal; and being a good judge of 
human nature, he read in their eyes the doubts that 
were clouding their minds. 

The masters were saying to themselves that it was 
all very well for their director to talk about depending 
on the providence of God, for he had an abundance of 
money to fall back on to relieve his own wants. 
But with them it was another story. They were 
poor men; they had no steady income, no rich 
patrimony. Suppose they were to give themselves 
entirely to the task of educating the poor boys of the 
city and spend their youth and their talents in the 
work ; might not the schools be broken up, or might 
not sickness come, or might not the weight of years 
compel them to lay down the burden? What would 
become of them then.^ He could afford to ignore the 
future; but they could not. 

St. de la Salle saw the force of these objections and 
he met them squarely like the brave man he was. He 
remembered that the great saints loved poverty as a 
virtue especially dear to God; he recalled that his 
Divine Master was so poor that He was born in a 
stable and buried in a stranger's tomb; and so he 
took the resolution of giving away all his wealth. He 
would put' himself absolutely on a level with the 
schoolmasters. They were poor men, dependent 
solely on the goodness of God and the charity of the 



A CHEERFUL GIVER 63 

faithful. Very well; he would make himself as poor 
and dependent as they. He would say with St. Peter, 
"Silver and gold have I none.'' 

Once more he consulted the saintly Father Barre. 
Might it not be well to use his vast wealth to estab- 
lish schools all over the land, to build suitable houses 
for his teachers to live in, to give them, by means of 
his money, the best possible training for ^their pro- 
fession.'^ But Father Barre, foolish, perhaps, as men 
judge of such things, but truly wise with the wisdom 
of God, thought otherwise. "If you found schools 
with your own money," he said, "they will founder. 
Build your educational work on confidence in God. 
By all means become poor, even as Christ was poor; 
but instead of putting your money into the schools, 
give it away in charity, to the needy and the afflicted. 
Be really generous, and God will take care of you.'' 

St. de la Salle acted on this remarkable advice. 
Hard times came upon the land, sickness and famine 
stalked through the streets of Reims; and in that 
hour of dire distress the founder of the Brothers 
distributed every penny of his patrimony among the 
poor and the afflicted. 

This great work of charity he conducted with as 
much method as is employed by the scientific 
organizations of our own day. The distribution was 
made with care and order. He began by seeing that 
the poor lads who attended the schools were properly 
fed. School luncheons were served regularly. Boys 
are boys the world over; for, we are told, the young- 
sters of Reims came to receive the food with much 
more eagerness than they came for instruction. 



64 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

Then, every morning a breadline formed outside the 
house in New Street, a line not differing much from 
the breadlines that in time of stress form in our great 
cities to-day. There were honest workmen out of 
work, men who had lost their wealth through 
gambling and reckless speculation, professional beg- 
gars by the dozens, the halt and the feeble, the blind 
and the lame. They were all brought into the house 
and made comfortable, the saint himself or one of his 
assistants gave them a little talk about God or a 
short instruction on the truths of the Catholic faith, 
and then the hungry were fed and the needy relieved 
by presents of money. Sometimes he heard of 
people who, though they were poor and hungry, were 
ashamed to join the breadline. Such persons he 
found out and managed to help in such a way as not 
to wound their feelings. 

His wealth was great, but the demands upon it 
were greater. One day the breadline stood at the 
door for a longer time than usual, for his money and 
provisions were all gone. Then the saint took a 
basket and went from door to door among the resi- 
dences of the wealthier inhabitants, begging for food 
and money. In that way he was able to continue his 
good work until the period of famine was over. 

St. de la Salle was now ready to found his Institute 
of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. He had 
made the supreme sacrifice. He had become a beggar 
for Christ's sake. And "God loveth a cheerful 
giver.'' 



CHAPTER IX 
THE TORCH-BEARERS 

THE Feast of Our Lord's Ascension fell on May 10 
in the year 1684. The date is worth remember- 
ing in this history, for it was on that day that St. 
de la Salle took the first steps toward organizing his 
school masters into a religious community. They 
were already teachers, and most of them good 
teachers. But they were to be something more. 
The saint was convinced that God wished them to 
be members of an organization, to be soldiers in an 
army of holiness and learning, to take upon them- 
selves the obligations and reap the great rewards 
of men who lead what is called the religious life. 

Great men do their great work in different ways, 
and they seek to have that work last after them; 
their work is, so to speak, their child, and it is their 
wish that it should continue in the world long after 
they themselves are dead. The great work of 
Shakespeare was his plays — glowing pictures of 
human life and soul-searching comments on men 
and things; and they remain in the world though he 
has been buried for more than three hundred years, 
and they are more cherished and admired to-day 
than when their author walked the London streets 
or sat beside the Avon. The great work of King 
Louis XIV was his kingdom, and in order to make it 
great and flourishing and, as he hoped, enduring, 

6^ 



66 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

he fought many wars and braved many dangers and 
sacrificed the Kves of thousands of his subjects. 
And his monarchy did last — for almost a century 
after his death. 

St. de la Salle was neither a dramatist nor a king; 
but he had a great work to do — a work that truly was 
a greater work than the work done by Shakespeare or 
King Louis. That work was the spread of popular 
education, the bringing of learning into the minds of 
the people, the forming of boys and young men into 
upright Catholics and loyal citizens. And in order to 
make that work live after him, in order to bring the 
benefits of Christian education to generations yet 
unborn, he founded an institute, the Brothers of 
the Christian Schools. ^' 

In Greece in the days of her glory — the Greece of 
the poets and philosophers, the Greece of the vic- 
torious armies, the Greece of the Olympian games — 
there was a festival called the Feast of the Torches. 
The people would form in two long rows, extending 
mile upon mile, and down between the two lines of 
people relays of swift runners would speed along, one 
relieving the other, holding aloft a lighted torch. 
When one runner stopped exhausted, he would pass 
the flaming torch to another runner who would dash 
on down between the lines, and he in turn would 
hand on the torch to still another runner. The fes- 
tival was not considered a success if the first runner, 
the man who had lighted the torch, let it fall to the 
ground or let it go out; that torch must be kept 
burning and kept moving all the time. 

So it is with education. Learning is the light of the 



THE TORCH-BEARERS 67 

human mind; were it to go out, the human race 
would be in darkness. And St. de la Salle, the man 
who kindled the torch of popular education in Reims, 
was not content to let the torch fall to the ground; 
he wanted to organize a little band of well-trained 
athletes who, passing the torch of learning from hand 
to hand, might carry it on and on, to city after city 
and country after country and generation after 
generation. ' 

That is why, on the Feast of the Ascension, 1684, 
St. John Baptist de la Salle brought together the 
twelve leading teachers of his schools and spent 
seventeen days with them in council and in prayer. 
It was the first assembly of the Institute. They 
were to organize the torch-bearers, to discuss the 
means of making their educational work more 
fruitful and more lasting. The torch of Christian 
education was now alight; it was their business to 
keep it ever burning. 

Much of their time during that retreat was spent 
in prayer. Like all the saints, the holy founder was 
a strong believer in prayer. He knew that he and 
his disciples could not act wisely unless they received 
light from Heaven. The rest of their time was taken 
up with the interchange of opinions regardtug the 
organization of the teachers and the schools. In 
those discussions it was the schoolmasters who spoke 
first and the saint who spoke last; it was a thoroughly 
democratic assembly. Such a thing was very 
unusual in seventeenth century France, the France 
of Louis XIV; but in this, as in ever so many other 
things, St. de la Salle was far ahead of his times. 



68 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

He realized that the best rules, the rules that are 
most likely to be respected and obeyed, are not the 
rules forced upon people against their will but the 
rules which people cheerfully impose upon them- 
selves. 

The masters were eager to bind themselves for life 
to the work of the schools; they wished to promise 
God to remain Christian Brothers for the rest of 
their days. The saint was pleased with their enthu- 
siasm, but he knew so much about the inconstancy 
of human nature that he persuaded them to modify 
the plan. Instead, therefore, on the morning of 
Trinity Sunday, St. de la Salle and the first twelve 
Brothers knelt before the altar in the little chapel 
of the New Street house and made temporary vows — 
vows by which they promised to obey the superior 
of the Institute and to remain with the Brothers 
during one year. And as they made the promise, 
they held lighted candles in their hands — a happy 
symbol of the flaming torch of Christian education 
which they were to carry through the world. 

It was at this first assembly, too, that the name of 
the Institute was adopted. Previously the teachers 
had been called masters. Henceforth they were to be 
known as Brothers — as the big brothers of the boys 
in the schools. The word Schools was included in 
the title of the Institute as a reminder to its members 
that its essential work is education — that they were 
not to be Trappists or Carmelites living apart from 
the world, but educators, in the world but not of 
it, giving their time and their talents to teaching. 
And the adjective Christian was added to show that 



THE TORCH-BEARERS 69 

in their work of teaching the Brothers were to imitate 
Our Lord Jesus Christ, the world's Supreme Teacher, 
and that in a special way they were to teach His 
holy doctrine. Such is the origin of the name, 
Brothers of the Christian Schools. 

The following winter the Brothers definitely 
adopted the black habit, with the white collar, 
which they still wear. That collar, or rabat, as it is 
called, was much like the collar worn by priests in 
France in the days of Louis XIV. The habit itself 
differed from the priestly soutane by the absence of 
buttons — to this day the Brothers' habit is fastened 
with iron hooks — and by being worn without a belt 
or sash. Because he was a priest, St. de la Salle is 
represented in pictures as wearing the soutane and 
sash. He was the only priest who was ever a member 
of the Institute. 

At first St. de la Salle thought of having priests in 
the Institute as well as Brothers, for in all the great 
orders of the day priests were considered necessary. 
He selected one of the most saintly and brilliant of 
the first Brothers, Brother Henry, and had him make 
his theological studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris. 
But, almost on the eve of being ordained a priest. 
Brother Henry took sick and died. It was a severe 
blow to the holy founder, who dearly loved this 
faithful disciple; but he accepted the occurrence as 
being an expression of the holy will of God. And 
the more he thought about it, the more he became 
convinced that there should be no priests in his 
Institute. The Brothers were to be teachers, they 
were to give their time and talents to school work. 



70 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and for them the labors of the priesthood — like preach- 
ing and hearing confessions and attending the sick — 
though glorious works in themselves, would really 
be distractions from the great tasks of education to 
which they were devoting their lives. So he inserted 
in the rule of the Brothers the precept that they 
shall not become priests, nor even wear the surplice, 
nor perform any function in the church except to 
serve low Mass. 

By means of this important rule, the founder of 
the Institute of the Christian Schools made clear 
the fact that the vocation to the Brotherhood is 
something distinct from the vocation to the priest- 
hood. Even in our own time many persons fail 
to grasp the distinction. The Brothers are religious, 
making the usual vows and leading a community 
life; but they are not priests or students for the 
priesthood. In the strict sense of the word they are 
laymen, not clerics. Freed from the obligation of 
reciting the oflBce, of answering sick calls, and of 
administering the sacraments, they are able to give 
their entire time to the three occupations to which 
they have devoted their lives: To prayer, for they 
are religious, wearing a religious habit and following 
a religious rule of life; to teaching, for that is the 
reason why their Institute came into existence, and 
it is impossible to think of the Christian Brother 
who is not a teacher; to study, for the man who 
ceases to be a student ceases to be an eflBcient 
teacher. 

In founding the Brothers of the Christian Schools, 
St. de la Salle did something that had never been 



THE TORCH-BEARERS 71 

done before. True, there had been many religious 
orders in the Church before his time; but not an order 
of men devoted to teaching as the one essential 
work of their organization. Dominicans, Francis- 
cans and Jesuits engage in teaching — indeed, those 
three orders have produced some of the finest 
teachers in the world; but they do many other things, 
like giving missions and visiting hospitals and prisons 
and acting as spiritual directors for men and women. 
But the Brothers of the Christian Schools are con- 
cerned with no external work but the education of 
boys and young men. As we shall soon see, St. 
de la Salle had no narrow conception of that work, 
and the Brothers of to-day who teach in colleges, not 
less than the Brothers who teach in orphan asylums, 
are working in harmony with the spirit of their 
founder; but the saint was insistent that nothing 
whatever — even so sacred a thing as the priesthood 
itself — should interfere with their work as teachers. 
''AH kinds of teaching, and nothing but teaching" 
— such might be considered the scope of the Brothers' 
external work as determined by St. de la Salle. 



CHAPTER X 
ON TO PARIS! 

PARIS, the capital of France, is one of the four 
or five supremely famous cities in the world. 
If we were to cut from our books of history and 
literature and philosophy and science all that per- 
tains to Paris, we should find very few pages left to 
read and think about. For centuries the kingdom 
of France was called "the Eldest Daughter of the 
Church," and the great city of Paris was the fairest 
jewel that blazed upon her brow. 

Many and many a time in the world's history 
armies of invaders, seeking to conquer the French 
nation, raised as their battle-cry, "On to Paris!" 
"On to Paris!" cried the Burgundians, when they 
sought to wrest the sovereignty from the crabbed 
fingers of King Louis XI. "On to Paris!" cried the 
English under the gallant King Henry V when they 
triumphed over the French troops in the great 
battle of Agincourt. "On to Paris!" cried the Ger- 
mans in 1870, when they inflicted a humiliating 
defeat on Napoleon III, and again in 1914 when 
they swept through Belgium and northern France, 
only to be checked at the River Marne. 

And "On to Paris!" was the battle cry of St. John 
Baptist de la Salle. He was the leader of an army, 
and he sought to plant his banner on the walls of 
the historic capital of France. But the army he led 

72 



ON TO PARIS 73 

was very different from the Burgundian army or the 
Enghsh army or the German army. His was an 
army of peace and love and goodness; a Kttle army 
of educators who came, not to bring hatred and woe, 
but to spread knowledge and religion. His soldiers 
were the torch-bearers of Christian education, and 
the standard they carried was the cross of Christ. 
Of all the aspiring generals who at one time or 
another had cried, "'On to Paris!" the founder of 
the Brothers was the first to march on the city with 
gifts in his hand and with love in his heart. 

Like all men who do really great and good things 
in the world, St. de la Salle made his entry into the 
city very humbly and quietly. In February, 1688, 
accompanied by two Brothers, he arrived in the 
capital and undertook the management of a parish 
school. A pious priest. Father de la Barmondiere, 
had invited him, and the saint felt that the invitation 
came from God Himself, that it was God's will that 
the work of the Christian Schools, which had pros- 
pered so well in Reims, should now be carried on 
in the great city of Paris. And before very long 
God made it clear that it was indeed His holy will 
that the Brothers should spread the light of educa- 
tion in the French capital, for He blessed their work 
and made it possible for the saint to open several 
schools and to take many poor boys under his care. 

Yet it was not easy work; God's work seldom is 
easy, for it is work that involves constant warfare 
against the powers of evil. You might think that a 
man coming to do nothing but good in the great city, 
a man who sought nothing for himself and who only 



74 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

wanted to help needy boys get an education, would 
be received with open arms, that the people would 
gladly welcome him and help him in every way they 
could. But such was not the case. The saints in 
all ages, the men who strove against sin and igno- 
rance, always had to fight hard, and St. de la Salle 
was no exception to the rule. This great soldier of 
Christian education eventually conquered the city 
and the country and the world; but first he had to 
fight, and fight hard, against many foes who tried 
to impede his efforts and destroy his work. 

A long, hard battle the saint had to fight against 
envy and misunderstanding. When we study the 
lives of great men, especially the lives of the saints, 
we find that the benefactors of humanity and the 
servants of God are often annoyed and thwarted 
by people who, while not really bad, nevertheless do 
not understand and do not like to see others succeed 
in work in which they themselves have failed. 
Others had tried to establish schools in Paris and 
had sought to control and educate the boys of the 
Paris streets; and for various reasons they had not 
succeeded in their attempts. So now, when St. de la 
Salle, who was an educational genius, came along 
and taught the boys to like education and established 
schools which proved successful, the men who had 
made the earlier attempts were envious of his 
triumph and did all they could to hinder his work 
and even to force him and his Brothers to leave the 
city. 

Some of the opposition which St. de la Salle had 
to face came in a way that is almost amusing. Many 



ON TO PARIS 75 

of the boys who attended his schools in Paris used 
to work part of the time in a stocking factory. 
The men in charge of the factory Hked to have the 
boys thus employed, for the lads did considerable 
work and received but very small wages for their 
labor. Before the Brothers opened their schools, 
the factory managers could call upon the boys to 
work for them at almost any time they chose, but 
St. de la Salle, who considered school-work more 
important than making stockings, insisted that the 
school hours should not be cut short at the whim of 
the hosiery manufacturers. The result was that 
the bosses protested and threatened, and even tried 
to make people believe that these new teachers were 
trying to destroy an important industry. 

This difficulty St. de la Salle solved in an up-to- 
date and satisfactory manner. He saw that the 
poor boys needed an education, and needed it 
badly; but he also saw that they needed to continue 
their work of making stockings. What did he do? 
He sent to Reims for one of his Brothers who under- 
stood the hosiery industry and installed that Brother 
in the schools as an instructor in stocking-making. 
A portion of the school day was set apart for instruc- 
tion in the trade, but the boys remained in the 
school and under the care of the Brothers while 
fitting themselves to take positions in the factory 
later on. This was the first of the trade or technical 
schools which the Brothers have since conducted in 
various parts of the world. 

But soon another difficulty arose, a difficulty 
that would never have occurred if the schools of St. 



76 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

de la Salle had not been such excellent schools. 
There were certain men in Paris known as the 
writing-masters, who managed to make a living 
by teaching boys to write. They were generally 
ignorant men, like the country schoolmasters of the 
day, but they were the only teachers to whom boys 
of the poorer classes could go for instruction. When 
St. de la Salle established his schools and offered 
absolutely free instruction, not only in writing but 
in other branches of study, it was natural that some 
boys who previously had been paying the writing- 
masters for tuition were glad to change to the new 
schools. And when the new schools proved so 
successful that they soon became the talk of the 
town, more and more of the pupils of the writing- 
masters cam^ to the Brothers for instruction. The 
consequence was that the writing-masters, having 
fewer pupils than formerly, and therefore receiving 
less money, became very bitter against St. de la 
Salle and his teachers, whom they accused of pre- 
venting honest men from making a living and of 
taking the bread out of their mouths. They tried 
every means, even having recourse to lawsuits, 
to close St. de la Salle's schools and to drive the 
Brothers from the city. 

St. de la Salle wished no harm to the writing- 
masters, and in founding his schools in Paris he 
had no thought of trying to put the writing-masters 
out of business. It was not his fault if the writing- 
masters' schools were so inferior that they could not 
stand a little wholesome competition. His purpose 
was to educate boys who were too poor to pay for 



ON TO PARIS 77 

an education, and indeed most of his pupils were 
boys so poor that the writing-masters would have 
nothing to do with them. But, on the other hand, 
the saint made it a rule not to turn away any boy, 
rich or poor, who came to his schools. He suffered 
keenly on account of the professional jealousy of 
the secular teachers, but he remained steadfast in 
his purpose of continuing his schools and of making 
them and keeping them the best schools in the city. 
His own Brothers, the masters whom he had 
formed and guided and encouraged, whom he had 
made into effective and successful teachers, were 
not all as grateful as they should have been for the 
careful professional training he had given them. 
Some of them added to his troubles by severity with 
their pupils, whom they foolishly sought to terrify 
rather than to win by gentleness and devotion. 
Some of them, seeing opportunities for themselves 
and forgetting the ties of gratitude which should 
have bound them to the Institute, left the organiza- 
tion and sought to establish schools of their own. 
Some of them, whom St. de la Salle had placed in 
positions of trust and authority, became too self- 
important and independent — for power is always bad 
for weak heads — and resented the kind and tactful 
direction of the man who had made them. Some of 
them were guilty of the disloyal and contemptible 
error of not keeping their troubles at home and 
insisted on making their complaints to outside 
friends. Of course, in such cases the outside friends 
— some of whom were envious of St. de la Salle 
and his work — invariably sided with the discon- 



78 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

tented Brothers, and agreed that the founder of the 
Institute was unkind and incompetent. 

Tongues wagged and wagged, as tongues are ever 
prone to do, and the complaints of the few mal- 
contents lost nothing in the telling. There are 
always to be found some good people who just can't 
help telling bad news, and who are so anxious to 
tell it that they generally don't wait to find out how 
true it may be. Such persons were very numerous 
in Paris in the days of Louis XIV, and they 
succeeded in making such a stir over St. de la Salle, 
the Brothers and the schools, that on one occasion 
the saint's ecclesiastical superiors, without investi- 
gation and solely on the strength of the evil rumors, 
ordered him deposed from the government of the 
Institute and appointed a young priest to take his 
place. The saint, with that humility and obedience 
which always distinguished him, promptly agreed to 
step down from the head of the organization which 
he had founded and to which he had devoted the 
best years of his life. But with the Brothers it was 
another story. 

The new superior was introduced to them, but 
they resolutely refused to accept him. The majority 
of the Brothers had always been warmly attached to 
St. de la Salle, and at this critical moment even most 
of the discontented ones decided that a change could 
only be a change for the worse. The spokesman of 
the Brothers respectfully but firmly insisted that 
it was the determination of the teachers to have no 
superior but St. de la Salle, that his direction was 
necessary for the guidance of the Institute and for 



ON TO PARIS 79 

the supervision of the schools; that, in short, were 
he deposed from oflBce, the Brothers would give up 
the educational works in which they were engaged. 
In the face of such a welcome the young priest 
who had been appointed to assume direction of the 
Institute promptly decided that the task was a little 
too strenuous for him. The matter was finally settled 
to the satisfaction of all concerned by having St. de 
la Salle restored to oiSSce, 



CHAPTER XI 
THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 

IN our country and in our day it is possible for 
every child to secure at least the rudiments of an 
education. Free grammar schools and high schools, 
parochial schools and trade schools, are to be found 
everywhere throughout the United States; and col- 
leges and universities, maintained either by public 
funds or by private endowment, are plentiful enough 
to meet the needs of young people with the brains 
and the energy necessary to secure the highest 
scholastic training. We still have some men and 
women in a few isolated parts of the country who 
do not know how to read and write; but ordinarily 
there is no excuse for such illiteracy. Certainly, 
there is plenty of opportunity for learning. 

Such was not the case in France in the age of the 
Great King. There were colleges and academies for 
the children of the nobility, though many members 
of the French aristocracy declined to take advantage 
of them. But for the common people there was a 
notable dearth of educational facilities. We have 
seen how poor was the teaching done by the secular 
schoolmasters in city and country; but even if that 
teaching had been of the very first order, the number 
of schools was so small that only relatively few of 
the children of the people could have enjoyed their 
advantages. From time to time holy men and 

m 



THE SCHOOLS OP THE PEOPLE 81 

women, realizing the importance of learning for 
the young, established schools for boys and for girls, 
but for the most part the efforts ended in failure. 
Not until St. de la Salle founded his Institute and 
opened schools for boys on an extensive scale, did 
the movement in favor of popular education take 
firm root and grow and prosper. Not until the gradu- 
ates of his schools went out into the world and 
demonstrated the value of a sound, practical, Chris- 
tian education, did the people begin to realize 
that scholastic training is something to be sought 
after and esteemed. 

The boys who filled the first classes of the Brothers' 
schools in Paris were in many instances the sad 
products of the disorderly life that ebbed and flowed 
in the crooked streets of the grea-t city. They were 
boys, some of them, whom their parents were 
unwilling or unable to control, boys with no feeling 
for discipline and piety, boys who had been running 
wild, and had formed undesirable habits of thinking 
and of acting. To change such lads into docile, 
studious, polite and devout pupils was not the work 
of a day. It was a task that required not only time, 
but much patience and a deep knowledge of human 
nature. In that almost impossible effort, St. de la 
Salle and his Brothers ultimately succeeded, but 
not until their nerves and their devotion had been 
sorely tried. 

But a change — a change so great and so remarkable 
that all Paris noticed it — did come over the pupils of 
the Christian Schools. The boys who formerly had 
been ranging around the city in gangs, the terror of 



82 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

respectable citizens and the ready tools of rogues 
and scoundrels, now developed into well-mannered 
and self-respecting youths who entered and left their 
classrooms in order and silence, and who attended 
Mass with all the external marks of genuine devotion. 
They became interested in their books, and they 
attended instructions on Sundays as well as on 
school days. 

How was the change accomplished? Certainly not 
by fear of punishment, for St. de la Salle insisted 
that flogging in any form must never take place in 
the schools of the Brothers. This rule he stressed in 
his recommendations to his teachers in words so 
strong and pointed as to leave no doubt of the disgust 
he felt for the practice of corporal punishment. 
But he had recourse to better and surer and more 
effective means. He made school life a pleasure 
instead of a task. He always acted like a gentleman 
himself, and the pupils were impelled, by admiration 
or by shame, to strive to imitate his own gentle 
and courteous manners. The importance of showing 
good example to the students at all times, of being 
models of politeness, was something which the holy 
founder never wearied of impressing on his Brothers. 
Most of his teachers learned the lesson, and the 
results were good order in class and the formation in 
the pupils of gentlemanly habits o^ speaking and 
acting. 

But a still more important factor in the success 
of the schools established by St. de la Salle was his 
happy manner of making religion the center of 
educational life. Religion with him did not mean 



THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 83 

merely memorizing the catechism; it meant taking 
God into account in everything we do. The class 
exercises began and ended with prayer; and at 
frequent intervals during the school day a pupil 
would arise and reverently say aloud, ''Let us 
remember that we are in the holy presence of God." 
Whereupon teacher and pupils would pause for a' 
moment in their work and silently make a brief 
act of adoration. In every classroom there was a 
crucifix, and pictures of Our Lord, the Most Blessed 
Virgin and St. Joseph adorned the walls. The holy 
founder brought both teachers and pupils to realize 
that religion is the biggest thing in life, the most 
interesting thing in life, the most important thing 
in life, and that when they acted according to the 
dictates of religion they were doing something of^ 
benefit to themselves and something pleasing to God. 

By means of instructions on the life of Our Lord 
and on the principal truths of the Catholic religion, 
the Brothers brought the boys to understand their 
faith and to love the practice of it. In the age of 
Louis XIV as in our own age and in every age, some 
people did not take religion seriously, did not make it 
a part of their lives. The purpose of the Christian 
schools was to bring the boys of Paris to see that a 
man who does not know and practice his faith is 
like a man who has lost the use of his limbs; he is 
helpless and cannot do what God wants him to do 
in the world. 

St. de la Salle was successful in his work of edu- 
cating the children of the people largely because 
he had the courage to break away from old-fashioned 



84 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

methods of instruction and to suit the manner of 
teaching to the times in which he lived. The founder 
of the Brothers was full of new ideas and, even 
though he was accused of being a radical, he was 
brave enough to apply those ideas fearlei^sly to the 
conditions which he faced and the problems which 
he met. Like every educated man, St. de la Salle 
had a great respect for the past, but he was clear- 
minded and progressive and realized that many 
things in the past were wrong, that many more 
things, though good in their day, were no longer 
salutary, and that even the best things that had 
been accomplished in the past could be improved on 
to suit the changing conditions of a new age. Let 
us consider two instances of this wise progressiveness : 
His adoption of the class method of teaching, and 
his attitude toward the language of the country. 

Until the time of St. John Baptist de la Salle, 
what was known as the individual method of instruc- 
tion was in vogue in the schools. Some earlier 
educators had sought to improve upon it, and had 
been in a measure successful; but it remained for 
the founder of the Brothers to break away from it 
entirely and to change, for good and all, the manner 
of instructing children. 

What was the individual method of instruction? 
It was a method by which the pupils in the class 
studied, usually in different books, and then recited 
their lessons to the teacher one at a time. There was 
no grading as we understand the term, no team 
work, no studying of the same lesson by all the 
pupils. The teacher gave his explanations and made 



THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 85 

his corrections, not to all the pupils at one time, but 
to each pupil, one after another. One by one the 
boys would come up to the teacher's desk and receive 
their lessons; in the meantime the rest of the pupils 
could study by themselves, or just sit and dream, or 
even engage in some sort of play. The result was, 
of course, a great waste of time and a great deal of 
confusion. We have some old wood-cuts, dating 
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, giving 
us views of the schools of the times. Most of them 
show that the pupils not directly under the eye of 
the master had what they considered a very good 
time; they were openly loafing or else engaged in 
what modern boys call "rough house.'' And even 
though in all the pictures the teacher is armed with a 
very businesslike-looking switch, it is clear that there 
was very little order in the schools. 

All this St. de la Salle changed. He made it a rule 
that all the pupils should have the same books, that 
they should study the same lessons and that the 
instructions and explanations of the teacher should 
be given to all the pupils at one time. In the reading 
lesson, for example, while one pupil read aloud, all 
the other pupils were to follow him word by word in 
their books and be prepared to read aloud whenever 
called upon to do so by the teacher. If the reader 
made a mistake in pronunciation, the teacher, 
instead of making the correction himself, must call 
upon one of the pupils to point out the error. The 
pupils were carefully graded according to their 
proficiency, and silence was strictly observed in 
the class. 



86 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

This method, known as the simultaneous or class 
method, is now in use in schools all over the world. 
It is so common and seems so natural that we are 
surprised to learn that any other method was ever 
used. Yet it was not until St. de la Salle adopted 
and perfected it in his schools in Reims and Paris 
that it had ever been successfully carried out. 
Not without reason has the founder of the Brothers 
been called the Father of Modern Pedagogy. 

Again, for many centuries the language of learned 
men was Latin. It was known by educated persons 
all over Europe and was used exclusively by writers 
who wished their books to be read by the learned in 
Italy, France, Spain, and England. The languages 
of the various countries — languages like French or 
English or Portuguese — were called the common 
or "vulgar" languages; they were the languages of 
the people and many learned men looked upon them 
with something like contempt. This helps us to 
imderstand why Dante, the great Catholic poet of 
Italy, was criticized for writing his sublime poem, 
"The Divine Comedy," in Italian instead of in the 
learned Latin, and why scholars like Petrarch and 
Erasmus and Francis Bacon wrote in Latin the 
works which they considered their masterpieces. 

But a change was coming over the world — indeed 
it had already come. The "vulgar" tongues, like 
Italian and English, were gradually but surely 
taking the place of the learned Latin. Dante had 
written in Italian, Vondel had written in Dutch, 
Shakespeare and Milton had written in English; 
and, right in the days of Louis XIV, Corneille, 



THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 87 

Racine, and Moliere had written in French. The 
so-called "'vulgar" tongues had become learned 
languages, and it no longer sufficed for a man to 
know Latin in order to be an educated man. 

But, as is generally the case, the schools were 
behind the times. The little French boy going to 
even the elementary classes was taught to read and 
write, not his native tongue, but Latin; he was 
taught, not French grammar, but Latin grammar. 
This was not so bad for the sons of the aristocracy, 
who could stay at school for a long time; but it was 
very hard on the children of tradesmen and the 
poor who could look forward to only a few years of 
schooling. When leaving school they knew a little — 
usually a very little — Latin; and they knew no more 
French than if they had not gone to school at all. 

St. de la Salle believed that the function of the school 
is to prepare the pupils for their after life; and in the 
after life of the boys in his Paris schools Latin was 
not going to play a large part. On the contrary, 
French was to be their language of conversation, 
their language of business, and the language in 
which were written the books they w^ere most likely 
to read. So he boldly changed the whole scheme of 
education and insisted that in the schools of the 
Brothers everything should be taught in French. 
He maintained that a boy would make more rapid 
progress in his studies by learning in the language 
that he had begun to acquire in his babyhood, that 
he had heard in his home as a very little boy, that 
was used in the shops and in the streets and even 
in the sermons in church. And being a man who 



88 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

never did things by halves, and realizing that the 
time-honored practice of teaching in Latin could 
be banished only by employing the strongest possible 
means, he absolutely forbade the teaching of Latin 
in the Brothers' schools. 

It need hardly be said that St. John de la Salle 
had no silly prejudice against the Latin language. 
He was a truly educated man and was therefore 
above prejudices. His own training had been a 
Latin training and he had a keen appreciation, not 
only of the beautiful Latin used by the Catholic 
Church in her official prayers and ceremonies, but 
also of the great secular Latin literature which was 
and is one of the glories of the world. But he was 
not only an educated man; he was a practical man. 
He knew that in his day there were schools where a 
boy could learn Latin if he wanted to learn it; but 
he realized the pressing need of having schools 
wherein would be imparted a thorough and practical 
knowledge of the language of the country. His 
schools were the schools of the people; it was right 
and proper that in them should be taught the lan- 
guage of the people. 



CHAPTER XII 
A GOODLY TREE 

LET us reflect for a moment on the way a tree 
grows. It draws its sustenance from the soil, 
the air, and the sun, and slowly, but regularly and 
unceasingly, it increases in length and thickness 
and strength; it stretches out its branches and decks 
itself with foliage; and, if it is a fruit-bearing tree, 
it covers itself with pink or white blossoms, and 
when the blossoms fall the fruit begins to appear; 
slowly the fruit ripens, thanks to the warm sunlight, 
and presently you and I walk out into the orchard 
and pluck the fruit and taste it and say that it is 
delicious. 

What is the most remarkable thing about the 
growth of the tree? It is that the tree grows from 
within. It lengthens its branches from the inside. 
It thickens its bulk from the inside. It produces its 
blossoms from the inside. The air helps it, the soil 
helps it, and the sunlight helps it; but it grows by 
itself, and always from the inside. 

That is the way every living thing grows; that 
is why we speak of a growth from the inside as a 
vital growth. If a man were to go out into an 
orchard and pile some pieces of wood on the soil, 
and on top of the wood heap some flowers, and on 
top of the flowers place some apples or pears, nobody 
would think of saying that he was making a tree 

89 



90 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

grow. That would not be a true growth, a vital 
growth, because it would not be a growth from the 
inside. And, similarly, if a small boy should stand 
on a box or pile books on his head, you would not 
say that he had grown; for really to grow, the boy 
must grow as the tree grows, from the inside. 

The growth of an institution is in this respect like 
the growth of a tree or the growth of a boy; if it 
is to be genuine and vital, it must come from the 
inside. The tree grows because God has given it a 
something which we call a principle of growth; and 
a boy grows because God has given him, too, a 
principle of growth; and the Institute of the Chris- 
tian Schools has grown because God gave it, through 
its learned and saintly founder, a principle of growth. 
That principle of growth, that something which has 
enabled it to increase and multiply and spread out 
from the inside, is called the spirit or soul of the 
Institute. If it had no spirit it could not grow, just 
as a boy's body could not grow if the soul were not 
in it. Now, what is the spirit of the Institute of 
the Christian Schools.^ 

It is very easy to answer that question, because 
St. de la Salle himself has told us what it is in the 
rules he wrote for the guidance of his Brothers. It is 
a twofold spirit: The spirit of faith and the spirit 
of zeal. 

The spirit of faith is a very real and very strong 
belief in God. The true Christian Brother always 
thinks of God first, always makes sure that he is 
doing what God wants him to do, always does his 
work — whether that work be prayer or study or 



A GOODLY TREE 91 

teaching — because he is convinced that it is God's 
work. He reminds himself frequently that God is 
everywhere present, that God sees everything he 
does, that God knows everything that he thinks 
and desires and wills. St. de la Salle said that if a 
Brother has not this spirit of faith he should consider 
himself a dead member of the Institute, that he is 
like a branch broken off from the tree, a branch 
which will soon wither and die because it no longer 
shares in the growth of the tree. 

The spirit of zeal, which is the second part of the 
soul of the Institute of the Christian Schools, is a 
spirit of interest, of energy, of enthusiasm for the 
Christian education of youth. Everybody is zealous 
or enthusiastic about something. The athlete is 
enthusiastic about the game he plays, the merchant 
is enthusiastic about his business, the artist is 
enthusiastic about his paintings, the priest is enthu- 
siastic about preaching and hearing confessions and 
offering the Holy Sacrifice. And so the Christian 
Brother is supposed to be enthusiastic about the 
great work of teaching and the great work of study. 
If he lacks that interest, that enthusiasm, no matter 
how brilliant he may be and no matter how pious he 
may be, he has no business to be a Christian Brother; 
St. de la Salle sent away several candidates for the 
brotherhood who were both devout and learned, but 
who lacked this zeal, this enthusiasm, for teaching 
and study. 

When we understand that faith in God and zeal 
for education constitute the spirit of the Institute, 
the principle of the Institute's vital growth, we are 



92 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

able to see just how it was that the schools established 
by St. de la Salle grew in number and spread all over 
France and ultimately reached out into all parts of 
the world. The Institute of the Christian Schools 
was like a tree. Its roots took hold of the soil in 
the city of Reims and its branches extended to Paris 
and to many other cities of France, and it has since 
brought forth blossoms and fruit in Italy, in Ireland, 
in Spain, in Canada, in the United States, in South 
America, in Asia, and in Africa. And just as, by 
means of grafting, a tree can be made to bear several 
diflFerent kinds of fruit, so the Brothers founded by 
St. de la Salle have conducted various kinds of 
schools. 

It would not be especially profitable or interesting 
for us to learn all the details of the growth of the 
Institute in the time of its holy founder. City after 
city in France asked for the Brothers to open schools, 
and the saint, who was filled with faith and zeal, was 
very happy to accede to the requests. Much of his 
time he spent in long and tiresome journeys, making 
arrangements for opening new houses and superin- 
tending the work of his Brothers. He suffered 
much in many ways, but he had the great consolation 
of seeing the noble work to which he had devoted 
his life grow and prosper. He lived to see the little 
plant which he had so carefully watered and tended 
in Reims grow into a goodly tree with a stout trunk 
and with an abundance of foliage. 

St. de la Salle began by opening free schools for 
the children of tradesmen and the poor, but that 
was not the only type of school to which he gave 



A GOODLY TREE 93 

his attention. He was interested in every depart- 
ment of education, and whenever he saw the need for 
a particular kind of school he lost no time in supply- 
ing the need. His Brothers were the torch-bearers 
of Christian education, and he wanted them to bring 
the light of learning into any and every place 
shrouded in the darkness of ignorance. We have 
already seen how he early opened a trade school in 
Paris. It was not long before he established several 
other types of educational institutions in the capital 
and elsewhere. 

One of the first of these new departures was the 
Sunday-school. He was not the first man to gather 
the children on Sundays for instruction in Christian 
Doctrine, for that practice had been followed by 
many illustrious saints before his time, notably bj 
the great Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, in Italy^ 
St. Charles Borromeo. But the Sunday-schoois 
established by St. de la Salle taught more than 
Christian Doctrine. They were intended mainly for 
young men who, working during the week, had no 
opportunity of getting lessons in the subjects they 
needed to learn. Such young men he invited to 
his schools on Sundays, and offered them several 
hours' instruction in reading, writing, literature, and 
mathematics. The session closed with an instruction 
on the truths of religion. 

He also founded the equivalent of the modern high 
school, known as the Christian academy. Though 
he was first attracted to the field of elementary 
education, he saw the wisdom of giving a higher 
training to young men able to take advantage of it. 



94 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and accordingly opened classes offering advanced 
courses in Franch literature, geometry, architecture, 
mechanical drawing, and accounting. Some of those 
subjects, prior to his time, had not been taught at all, 
and he took pains to prepare some of the Brothers for 
this novel and important work. The Christian 
academy had two important results: It gave the 
students a thorough training in several practical 
subjects, subjects which would increase their earn- 
ing power and efficiency; and it served to fill the gap 
which heretofore had existed between the elementary 
schools and the universities. 

The first schools of St. de la Salle had been estab- 
lished to supply the educational needs of poor and 
neglected boys and to help the children of tradesmen 
in the cities of France. They were, as we have 
seen, true schools of the people, the common people 
who had had previously but slender opportunities 
for securing an education. But the success of the 
schools and the fine character of the young men who 
were graduated from them soon attracted the atten- 
tion of the wealthier classes and the nobility, and 
early in the eighteenth century St. de la Salle was 
asked to open a boarding college for the children of 
the well-to-do. As usual, the saint lost no time in 
acting on the suggestion. He had no narrow concep- 
tion of the scope of his educational work. It was 
not his intention to confine his Institute to but one 
type of school or to supply the educational needs of 
but one class of the people. It sufficed for him to see 
the need for a school, any kind of school. His torch- 
bearers were not to turn away from any opportunity 



A GOODLY TREE 95 

of forming character and imparting a Christian 
education. 

There is a story of a lady in one of our modern 
American cities, who was alone in her house one 
quiet afternoon when she was startled to hear a 
noise in the dining-room downstairs. Timidly she 
investigated, and to her horror discovered a burglar 
filling a sack with her silverware. Almost out of her 
mind with terror, she crept cautiously down the 
front steps and rushed along the street looking for a 
policeman. At last she found one, and breathlessly 
told him of the intruder and begged him to come 
and make an arrest. But the policeman stroked his 
mustache and shook his head. "I can't help you, 
madam," he announced. ''I am not on patrol duty; 
I am a member of the traffic squad." i 

Unfortunately, there are some educators who 
have as narrow a conception of their work as that 
police officer had of his. ''It is not our duty to teach 
this or that type of school," they say; and they say 
it even when there is a pressing need for their ser- 
vices, when no other educators are there to take up 
the work. St. John Baptist de la Salle was not that 
kind of man. His faith in God and his zeal for 
learning were so great and so active that he was 
eager to take up any kind of needed educational 
work. That is why he established trade schools 
and high schools and Sunday-schools; and that is 
why he gladly opened boarding-colleges. And in 
order to make the boarding-colleges the best insti- 
tutions of their kind, he made an exception in their 
case against his rule of charging absolutely nothing 



96 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

for the services performed by his Brothers. Obvi- 
ously, there could be no such thing as a free boarding- 
college; so St. de la Salle sanctioned the practice of 
having the students in such institutions pay a 
specified sum for their maintenance. 

Sometimes appeals for help came to him from 
country districts too small to maintain more than 
one teacher. In such cases he did not send a Brother, 
for he knew the dangers of living alone; but he took a 
number of secular men and taught them his methods 
of teaching, and then sent them into the country 
schools. This, the first normal school for secular 
teachers in the history of education, the saint con- 
ducted for many years at Reims and at Paris. 

In another chapter St. de la Salle has been called 
an educational genius. Perhaps we are now able to 
see why. A genius is a man, specially gifted by 
God, who does some one thing supremely well, who 
is considerably ahead of his times, who discards old 
and time-worn methods, and invents ways of doing 
things that are practical and praiseworthy. Shakes- 
peare was a dramatic genius. Napoleon was a mili- 
tary genius, Wagner was a musical genius. And 
St. John Baptist de la Salle was an educational 
genius. 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE IRISH BOYS 

/^VERLOOKING the Hudson River at Pocantico 
^^ Hills, New York, not far from the Tarrytown 
and Sleepy Hollow made famous by Washington 
Irving in his *' Sketch Book," is the novitiate and 
normal school of the Christian Brothers. The 
stained-glass windows in the beautiful chapel depict 
a number of scenes in the life of St. de la Salle and 
the history of his Institute. A visitor to the chapel 
is almost at once attracted to one of those windows 
in which a courtly gentleman wearing the insignia 
of a king is seen in converse with two churchly 
personages, one the Archbishop of Paris, the other 
St. John Baptist de la Salle. The courtly gentleman 
is none other than James II, King of England; and 
if the visitor knows something about English history 
and something about the character of the Stuart 
monarch, he will naturally wonder what King 
James is doing in a stained-glass window. Perhaps 
he will think of a certain episode in the Old Testa- 
ment and smilingly ask: "What! Is Saul among 
the prophets?" 

The story of that picture merits a prominent place 
in the history of St. de la Salle, for it helps us to 
understand the fine, broad views of education held 
by the holy founder as well as the high reputation as 

teachers the Brothers enjoyed before the close of the 

97 



98 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

seventeenth century. It opens up to us, likewise, an 
interesting phase of European history, and gives us a 
better insight into some of the international problems 
and conditions in the midst of which the Institute of 
the Brothers carried on its early work. So now let us 
take a glance at one of the most remarkable episodes 
in the history of the day, and find out how King 
James II managed to get into a stained-glass window. 

After the death of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord 
Protector of England during the supremacy of the 
Puritans, Charles II, who had sought refuge at the 
court of Louis XIV after the execution of his father, 
Charles I, returned to England and was accepted as 
king. This event, known as the Restoration, 
occurred in 1660. When Charles II died, he was 
succeeded by his brother, the Duke of York, who 
ascended the throne under the name of James II. 
The new king was a Catholic; and although he was 
not in all respects a good man, at least he deserves 
credit for clinging to his faith in spite of opposition 
and for suflFering persecution and exile because of 
that faith. There was a very strong feeling against 
Catholics in England and many of James's subjects 
disliked him and plotted against him. The opposi- 
tion after a while grew so strong that offers were 
made to James's son-in-law, William, Prince of 
Orange, to come from Holland and claim the English 
throne. William and his wife. King James's daughter 
Mary, accepted the invitation, and James fled to 
France to secure from Louis XIV the aid of men and 
money to retain his place on the English throne. 

The Great King received the deposed monarch 



THE IRISH BOYS 99 

with lavish hospitality and gave him generous aid. 
He did so through policy as well as through kindness. 
France had become so strong as a military power 
that most of the other countries of Europe were 
leagued against her. Louis knew that if the Prince 
of Orange were successful in his attempt to win the 
English crown, England would be added to the 
league; whereas, if James were retained as king, 
England would be allied with France. Not long 
after, at the head of a French army, King James 
crossed over to Ireland, where many fighting men 
joined his ranks. William and his Orangemen 
hastily embarked for Ireland, and in July, 1690, the 
two armies met in the celebrated Battle of the Boyne. 
The result of that battle was a crushing defeat for 
the Irish and French, and James fled back to France. 
Several other attempts were made to reseat the 
unfortunate Stuart monarch, but all without success, 
and James II died in disappointment and exile in 
1701. 

Among those who had fought with James were 
many English and Irish nobles. When the cause 
seemed lost they followed the example of their 
sovereign and fled to France, where they were gladly 
welcomed at the court of Louis XIV. With them, 
in several instances, came their families, for Ireland 
was no place to live in for the families of the men 
who had fought against the Prince of Orange. The 
exiles, while planning other means of restoring 
James to the English throne, were installed with their 
monarch at St. Germain. 

Among the exiles were some fifty Irish lads, totally 



100 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

ignorant of the French language and of the customs 
of the country on whose shores they had so suddenly 
found themselves cast. Louis XIV desired to employ 
them in various offices about the court, offices 
befitting their talents and their rank in life, and so 
sought for some means of educating them for the 
posts they were destined to fill. The training of 
the young strangers was a delicate and important 
task, and the French king consulted the Archbishop 
of Paris as to the teachers to be employed. The 
archbishop considered the matter carefully and then 
advised the king to entrust the Irish boys to the care 
of St. de la Salle. 

Were the founder of the Brothers less broad- 
minded in his conception of the scope of his Institute, 
he might have respectfully declined this work. He 
might have pleaded that his schools were for the 
poor, not for the nobility, that his work was for the 
children of France and not for exiles from an alien 
land. But the saint did nothing of the kind. He saw 
in this offer simply another educational opportunity, 
a chance for doing good, for molding youthful char- 
acters and for imparting learning to youthful minds. 
Without the least hesitation he accepted the charge 
and the fifty young Irishmen took up their abode in 
one of his Paris boarding-schools. 

A sad and homesick group of lads they must 
have been at first, living in a strange land and learn- 
ing in a strange tongue; but they were Irish and 
therefore quick to adapt themselves to new condi- 
tions. Besides, St. de la Salle and his Brothers took 
special pains to make the lot of the exiles as bearable 



THE IRISH BOYS 101 

as possible, and concentrated on the task of imparting 
to them a sound and practical knowledge of the 
French language and of French history. One thing, 
at least, the exiles and their teachers had in common, 
and that was the Catholic faith. Before long this 
novel school was running smoothly and the Irish 
boys were making rapid progress in their studies. 

Though King James had a good many troubles 
of his own, he did not forget the children of the 
men who had fought for him and for his rights. 
He was anxious to assure himself that they were 
happy and contented, that they were being well cared 
for and skillfully taught. So one day, accompanied 
by the Archbishop of Paris, the English monarch 
paid a visit to the school and greeted his little sub- 
jects. He was well pleased with things as he found 
them, and complimented St. de la Salle and his 
Brothers on the excellent results of the experiment. 

That visit is the subject of the stained-glass picture 
in the novitiate chapel at Pocantico Hills. In the 
foreground, to the right, stands the king, copiously 
bewigged and beruffled, with his cane and his sword 
and his plumed hat, attended by a group of courtiers. 
In the center is the archbishop; and to the left, 
surrounded by his pupils, is St. de la Salle. In the 
background looms the teacher's desk with its books 
and pens; and on the wall hangs a large crucifix — 
a mute but impressive reminder to the exiled mon- 
arch that in that classroom the pupils learn to love 
and honor a King greater than earthly kings. 

Of the subsequent careers of the lads who studied 
under St. John de la Salle in the exiles' boarding- 



102 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

school we know but little. Some of them doubtless 
remained at the court of Louis XIV and discharged 
satisfactorily the oflSces for which they were fitted. 
Some of them, we may be sure, took part in the 
several unsuccessful attempts to place the son and 
grandson of King James — known respectively as the 
Old Pretender and the Young Pretender — on the 
throne of England. More of them probably imitated 
the example of their fighting sires and in the French 
army struck stout blows against their English foes 
at Blenheim and Ramillies — and, maybe, even half 
a century later, at Fontenoy. The wanderlust, 
always so potent in Irish blood, may have lured others 
of them across the Atlantic to Canada and the 
southern colonies. All that is but a matter of con- 
jecture. But it is pleasant to reflect that through 
them the influence of St. John Baptist de la Salle 
spread into divers professions and into various parts 
of the world, and that the young Jacobites were 
better and wiser men because of their contact with 
the holy founder. 

And that is how James II of England happens to 
be in a stained-glass window. 



CHAPTER XIV 
THE MAKING OF A BROTHER 

IN the course of the thirty-odd years during 
which St. John Baptist de la Salle devoted him- 
self to the work of the Christian Schools, his society 
of religious educators had spread all over France. 
They had exercised their influence over the group of 
Irish youths, and a school had been established in 
the city of Rome, the capital of the Catholic world. 
The foundation of the Roman house is so interesting 
an episode in the history of the Institute of the 
Christian Schools, that a paragraph may profitably 
be given to it here. 

Like all true Catholics, St. de la Salle loved and 
honored our Holy Father, the Pope, and he wished 
that his Brothers might establish a house of the 
Institute in the very city where the successors of St. 
Peter have ruled the Church. So he sent two of his 
disciples to open a free school in the Eternal City. 
One of the Brothers was taken sick on the journey 
and had to return to France; but the other, Brother 
Gabriel, went on alone, and took up his residence in 
Rome. He was very poor and he met with many 
diflSculties, but at length he succeeded in starting his 
school and in keeping it open for thirty years. 
During all that time he was separated from the holy 
founder and the rest of the Brothers, but he was 
faithful to the charge entrusted to him by the saint 

103 



104 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

and he persevered in his holy vocation and did much 
good for the poor children of Rome. He did not 
return to France until after the death of St. de la 
Salle. Ever since, the Brothers have maintained a 
house in the city by the Tiber. 

So the Institute, in spite of envy and ignorance 
and opposition and persecution, had prospered. This 
it did, in the first place, because God blessed the 
work; in the second place, because the schools filled 
a manifest need; and in the third place, because St. 
John Baptist de la Salle exercised such great care 
in training his teachers and in supervising their 
classes. It is now time for us to consider just how 
that training was accomplished and to find out 
the ways in which the saint developed his Brothers 
in hohness and scholarship. 

First at Reims, then at Vaugirard (now within 
the city of Paris), and then at St. Yon in Rouen, 
St. de la Salle maintained a central or mother-house 
of his Institute. Here candidates for the Brotherhood 
were received and trained and educated; here they 
returned in the vacations and at other times to renew 
themselves in piety and learning; and here they 
came to spend their days when sickness or old age 
impaired their eflSciency in the classroom. 

The saint, who had received his own vocation to 
the priesthood while still a boy, well knew that God 
often calls to His service willing souls in the first flush 
of their youth. Therefore, one of the departments of 
the mother-house was the Junior Novitiate, intended 
for boys who, while still too young and too unlearned 
to be teachers, nevertheless desired to take up 



THE MAKING OF A BROTHER 105 

educational work. These "little novices/' as they 
were called, were the special objects of the saint's 
attention, and he labored to form them to habits of 
piety and to impart to them a relish for the things 
of the mind. They remained in the Junior Novitiate 
until they were sixteen or eighteen years of age. 
Then they entered the Novitiate proper. 

Just as every army has its military academy or 
training-school, like the French St. Cyr or the Eng- 
lish Aldershot or our own West Point, so every 
religious congregation has its Novitiate. It usually 
lasts one year. During that time the novices make 
sure of their vocation to the religious state, they 
strive to develop the virtues which should be prac- 
ticed by men specially consecrated to God, they 
learn the particular rules and regulations of their 
institute and they study the obligations of the vows 
by which later they hope to bind themselves to the 
service of God. 

The Novitiate of the Brothers in the days of 
St. de la Salle did not materially differ from the 
Novitiate of the Brothers in our own day. The 
candidates for the Brotherhood who are at this 
moment making their preliminary studies at Castle- 
ton, Ireland, or at Aurora, Canada, or at Pocantico 
Hills, New York, or at Ammendale, Maryland, or at 
Glencoe, Missouri, or at Martinez, California, follow 
substantially the same daily regulation that the saint's 
disciples followed at Vaugirard and St. Yon. The 
purpose of the Novitiate, then as now, was to lay 
the foundations of the religious life, and those foun- 
dations are^the same at all times and in all places. 



106 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

How do novices spend their time? Well, among 
other things, they sleep and eat and enjoy themselves 
like other human beings, but they do so at regular 
times and according to a prescribed rule. They learn 
the importance of regularity and of making the most 
of the time at their disposal. Thus, during meals, 
instead of chatting, they observe silence and listen 
to the reading of some good book; after repast they 
take a walk and discuss the book they have just 
heard read. Once a week they go for a long cross- 
country walk or engage in athletic sports, and every 
day they have an hour or so of healthful bodily 
exercise. Their studies during the Novitiate are 
entirely religious studies; they have a time for the 
reading of spiritual books, a time for the study of 
Christian Doctrine, a time for reciting vocal prayers, 
and a time for learning the theory and practice of 
mental prayer. They also have frequent exercise 
in the art of teaching catechism. 

When the time of the Novitiate was over, St. de la 
Salle did not consider his young Brothers suflBciently 
prepared for teaching in the schools. He knew that 
to put a pious but ill-trained teacher into a classroom 
is often to do more harm than good, that the teacher 
who doesn't know how to teach is something like a 
square peg in a round hole — and sometimes like a 
bull in a china shop. The Father of Modern Peda- 
gogy did not agree with those short-sighted, easy- 
going persons who tell us that ''anybody can teach.'' 
He knew that teaching is an art and a profession, 
and that the teacher needs as much training, and 
perhaps more, than the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, 



THE MAKING OF A BROTHER 107 

the architect, or the expert accountant. He saw, 
as clearly as anybody, the great need of Christian 
schools; but he also saw that it was better to have 
no schools at all than to have them poorly taught 
and incompetently managed. 

Accordingly, after completing the Novitiate, the 
young Brothers entered the normal training school. 
The Novitiate had laid the foundation of their 
religious life; the training-school was designed to 
lay the foundation of their educational life. In the 
training-school they did chiefly two things: They 
increased their own stock of learning, and they 
learned how to impart learning to others. Some of 
the first Brothers, odd as the attitude may seem, 
were rather afraid of learning; they fancied that to 
know very much would make them proud and ruin 
their piety. St. de la Salle was not long in showing 
them that scholarship, besides being a good thing 
in itself, was necessary for them in their lifework, 
that the teacher who has not a mighty love of books 
is like a soldier who dreads the conflict or a sailor who 
is afraid of seasickness. In the training-school the 
young teachers learned the principles upon which 
Christian scholarship is based. 

One of those principles — a principle which we can 
all apply in our own studies — is this: The aim of 
every right thinking man is to grow more and more 
like unto God. Our Blessed Lord said: "Be ye per- 
fect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." Now, 
God is infinitely perfect: He is not only Infinite 
Goodness; He is also Infinite Love, Infinite Beauty, 
Infinite Power, Infinite Knowledge. Pious persons 



108 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

sometimes take a narrow view of God's Infinite 
Perfection; they think only of His Infinite Goodness. 
But the Catholic scholar, the Catholic man of learn- 
ing, realizes that in proportion as he grows in knowl- 
edge — in proportion as he knows more of history and 
philosophy and literature and science — he grows 
more like unto God. Of course, what even the most 
learned man knows is as nothing in comparison with 
God's Infinite Knowledge, just as the holiness of 
even the greatest saint is as nothing in comparison 
with God's Infinite Goodness; but the fact remains 
that both the scholar and the saint are more like to 
God than the man who neglects improving his mind 
and sanctifying his soul. 

The young Brothers in St. de la Salle's normal 
training-school also learned how to teach. They 
received instructions in pedagogy, which is the art 
of teaching, and those instructions were later em- 
bodied in a book written by St. de la Salle called, 
"The Management of the Christian Schools." They 
learned how to secure and maintain the attention of 
their pupils; how to make their teaching interesting 
and practical; how to conduct classes according to 
the simultaneous method of teaching; how to give 
their pupils a true taste for study; how to make an 
impression on the hearts and the characters of boys. 
They were made to give specimen lessons, and those 
lessons were criticised by the Brother in charge of 
the young teachers. 

Even after they had completed the course in the 
normal training school the young Brothers were not 
considered entirely fitted for the work of the class- 



THE MAKING OF A BROTHER 109 

room. They had the theory of teaching, just as a 
boy who has studied Spalding's ''Baseball Guide'' 
has the theory of our national sport; but they needed 
practice in the actual work of teaching, even as 
the boy needs practice in the actual game on the 
diamond. So usually St. de la Salle had his young 
teachers spend some time in the classes of experienced 
Brothers, observing how the theory of teaching was 
carried into practice, and how the details of the art 
of education were handled by men who understood 
their profession. Then they were given classes of 
their own. 

Even then they were not left unaided and un- 
guarded. The saint was persuaded that teaching is so 
important and so complex an art that it takes years 
and years to master it, and that every teacher now 
and then needs direction and advice. And, therefore, 
in the rules that he wrote for the guidance of his 
Brothers, he insists upon three distinct officials who 
are to supervise the work of the schools and the 
teachers. The first of these is the Brother Inspector, 
whose duty it is to observe the various teachers at 
work, to examine their pupils, and to report to the 
Brother Director of the community on the condition 
of the classes. The second is the Brother Director 
himself, who is to superintend the school, to guide 
and advise the teachers, and to call their attention 
to any defects he may notice in their educational 
efforts. The third is the Brother Visitor. This 
official is obliged to visit all the classes at regular 
intervals, to hold examinations in Christian Doc- 
trine and the other subjects taught, to observe the 



110 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

conduct, not only of the regular teaching Brothers, 
but also of the Brother Inspector and the Brother 
Director, and to send a report of his investigations 
to the Brother Superior of the Institute. Never 
before was so elaborate a system of checks and 
balances applied to school work. It was a system 
thorough and completie, which shows how keenly 
the saint had studied every phase of teaching and 
school administration. 



CHAPTER XV 
THE ATHLETE OF GOD 

nnHOUGH the idea may at first seem unusual to 
-■- us, there is no novelty whatever in considering 
the saints as athletes. It was one of the most eminent 
of the saints, the great Apostle St. Paul, who com- 
pared the fervent Christian to the contender in the 
athletic games of Greece and who reminded us that 
the saint, like the athlete, must deny himself many 
things, must go through a course of rigorous training, 
must concentrate on his work, must diligently strive 
for mastery and must manifest both skill and endur- 
ance in the contest in order to win the prize. The 
athlete strives for a corruptible crown of laurel or 
parsley, the saint for an incorruptible crown of 
eternal glory. Let us in this chapter consider how 
St. John Baptist de la Salle showed himself to be a 
true athlete of God. 

The boy who wishes to distinguish himself in 
school athletics must do several important things. 
He must, first of all, make up his mind to go out and 
win, to lower records, to know the game and play 
the game. Play the game he must, and play it hard. 
On a fine sunny afternoon, when he feels very much 
like sitting around and taking things easy, he must 
conquer the inclination and go out on the field and 
get dusty and heated and bruised; and he must keep 

up that daily practice right through the season. 

Ill 



112 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

And he must study the game — ^know it in its larger 
outKnes and in its fine points. He must, too, observe 
experienced players in action and strive to learn the 
secrets of their success. And he must live a regular 
life, going to bed and getting up at fixed times, eating 
certain kinds of food and avoiding delicacies. 

Our athlete of God, St. de la Salle, did all these 
things. The game he played was a more complex 
and exacting and interesting game than track work 
or football, but he followed the same general prin- 
ciples of training and practice. He was striving for 
spiritual perfection, for exceptional holiness of life; 
and while still very young, in a very real and vital 
sense, he was out to win. He was tremendously in 
earnest. He made holiness, sanctity, the absorbing 
interest of his life, and he bent every energy and all 
his will power to secure skill in the science of the 
saints. 

Not for a single day did he neglect regular practice 
of his conflict with the enemies of salvation, the devil, 
the world, the flesh. These are the adversaries 
against w^hich God's athletes fight a lifelong battle. 
He was careful not to expose himself to temptations, 
and when temptations came to him — when, so to say, 
his opponents broke through his line — he was quick 
to check the rush and recover his ground. And he 
was most exact in using the means of securing 
spiritual strength and agility, without which it is 
impossible to win in the game of holiness. 

The means of becoming strong and active in the 
ways of God are chiefly two — prayer and mortifica- 
tion. All the saints were experts in prayer, for 



THE ATHLETE OF GOD 113 

prayer is the food that nourishes the soul and 
strengthens the will to do good and avoid evil. 
St. John Baptist de la Salle was devoted to prayer. 
Not only did he recite the community prayers of his 
Brothers with reverence and attention, but he often 
prayed while going through the streets and on his 
long and frequent journeys all over France. He 
loved to recite the Divine Office, and when walking 
about he usually had his rosary beads in his hand. 
Even as a boy he liked to make frequent visits to Our 
Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. This liking increased 
with the years, so that if he was wanted at any time, 
he could almost always be found on his knees in the 
chapel. 

The athletes of God give great attention to a 
certain kind of prayer that makes the soul grow in 
suppleness and strength. That form of prayer is 
what is called mental prayer or meditation. No 
matter how busy he might be with teaching or 
studying or superintending schools, St. de la Salle 
always spent several hours in mental prayer each 
day, and often he gave to this practice of devotion 
several hours of the night. As a young priest at 
Reims, every Friday he would spend the entire night 
in meditation in the church. Once a priest, who was 
staying at the Brothers' house, had occasion to go to 
the saint's room very late at night; he found the 
holy founder on his knees, intent on his conversation 
with God. Another time one of the Brothers found 
it necessary to go to St. de la Salle about four o'clock 
in the morning. He knocked several times at the 
door, and receiving no response, ventured to enter 



114 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

the room. The saint was lying on the floor beside 
an overturned prie-dieu; completely worn out by 
his toils and his vigils, he had fallen down exhausted 
in the midst of his prayers. He was like an athlete 
who overtaxes his strength and drops unconscious 
in the middle of the game. 

The practice of mortification is an important 
part of the holy athlete's course of training. St. 
de la Salle, who knew how valuable this virtue is in 
laying the foundations of holiness of life, loved it 
and practiced it up to the hour of his death. As a 
boy and a young man he had been accustomed to the 
daintiest food, so when he first went to live with the 
Brothers the coarser food sometimes actually made 
him ill. He tried hard to overcome this delicacy of 
taste, and soon succeeded. One day the cook — who 
seems to have had the absent-mindedness that 
characterizes a good many other cooks — accidentally 
seasoned the food with wormwood. The Brothers 
had only to taste the dish to discover that a mistake 
had been made; but St. de la Salle paid no attention 
to the bitter taste, and continued to eat his portion. 
That is but one example out of many to show how 
he practiced exterior mortification. 

He was not less adept in the mortification of his 
mind and heart. When he gave up his canonry and 
distributed his wealth among the poor, many persons 
told him to his face that he was a fool. Instead of 
getting angry or trying to defend himself, the saint 
would quietly agree with them and ask them to 
remember him in their charitable prayers. When he 
opened his first school in Paris some of the rougher 



THE ATHLETE OF GOD 115 

elements among the people would hoot at him and 
pelt him with mud as he went through the streets. 
Such insults he endured patiently and even gladly, 
for they made him a little more like to Our Lord, 
who had been abused and mocked at as He carried 
His cross through the streets of Jerusalem. 

In order to become more and more proficient in 
holiness of life, St. de la Salle studied the Lives of 
the Saints, that book which contains the history of 
God's most distinguished athletes. He there learned 
the details of the difficult art of sanctity, and en- 
couraged himself to renewed efforts to grow more and 
more like to the martyrs and confessors of earlier 
days. Above all, he read daily in the New Testa- 
ment, the wonderful book wherein Our Lord Himself 
has laid down the rules which His athletes are to 
observe if they would win the eternal crown of glory. 
He thought so much of this holy volume that he 
directed his Brothers to carry it about with them 
always and to read a portion of it every day. For 
he wanted his Brothers to be God's athletes, too. 
They were to be the torch-bearers of ^ Christian 
learning, and it was in the New Testament that 
they were to find the source of light and strength. 

A mark of the boy athlete is that he is always loyal 
to his school. He tries to win games, not merely for 
his own personal glory, but for the honor of the 
institution he represents; that is why he wears the 
school's monogram on his running suit or the block 
letter on his jersey. Similarly, St. de la Salle was 
characterized by intense loyalty to our Holy Mother, 
the Church. He had the deepest reverence and love 



116 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

for the Pope, and he honored and obeyed the bishops 
as the successors of the Apostles and the repre- 
sentatives of God. This loyalty of his was severely 
tested owing to the fact that in the days of Louis 
XIV in France some Catholics took part in a move- 
ment which was condemned by the Church. That 
movement is known as Jansenism. 

The Jansenists were people who had wrong ideas 
about grace and free will, and who in their conduct 
aimed at being extremely strict and rigorous. They 
thought, for example, that only very great saints 
should receive Holy Communion often, and they 
made the business of saving one's soul much harder 
than it really is. They were something like the 
Pharisees in the time of Our Lord and like the 
Puritans in seventeenth century England. Indeed, 
we can understand this matter fairly well if we try to 
remember that the Pharisees were long-faced Jews, 
the Puritans were long-faced Protestants, and the 
Jansenists were long-faced Catholics. 

Although he was a very holy man who could, when 
necessary, be very severe with himself, St. de la 
Salle was in no sense a long-faced man. He accounted 
good humor one of the marks of true devotion. His 
own habitual expression was gentle and pleasant; 
and he distinctly tells his Brothers in the rules he 
composed for their guidance to endeavor to have a 
cheerful rather than a melancholy countenance. 
Once he noticed a Brother who was looking somewhat 
surly and sour, and the holy founder said quietly, 
"My dear Brother, try not to go around with a face 
like the door of a jail." 



THE ATHLETE OF GOD 117 

Nor did he possess those habits of mind of which a 
long face is the outward indication. He had no 
sympathy with the gloomy doctrines of the Jansen- 
ists, who looked upon God as a sort of tyrant, eager 
to punish us for all our weaknesses; to him God was 
a kind and loving Father, who should be served 
through love rather than through fear. Some very 
learned and pious men of the time — including the 
brilliant writer, Pascal — and even some priests and 
bishops, were Jansenists; but St. de la Salle was on his 
guard against their errors and took every precaution 
that his disciples might not be led astray. Some of 
the Jansenists tried hard to win the saint over to 
their party, and offered to finance a novitiate for 
him and to endow several schools; but he would 
have absolutely nothing to do with them. When the 
sect was formally condemned by the Pope, St. de la 
Salle publicly announced his obedience to the Holy 
Father; and in his last words of advice to his 
Brothers he urged them to keep ever faithful to the 
teachings of the Church. Such was the loyalty of a 
true athlete of Christ. 

As the well-rounded athlete excels in many forms 
of sport, so St. de la Salle carried all the virtues to a 
high degree of perfection. His active faith, his 
ardent love of God, his self-sacrificing devotion to 
the welfare of his neighbor, his deep humility, his 
spotless purity, and his desire to do in all things the 
holy will of God, were the admiration of all who, 
knew him. Every practice of Catholic piety was 
dear to his heart. He loved the Mother of God with a 
tender, filial devotion, and always spoke of her as the 



118 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

Most Blessed Virgin, a beautiful custom which is to 
this day perpetuated by the Brothers and their pupils. 
He placed his Institute under the protection of St. 
Joseph, and he urged his Brothers to encourage their 
students to have a special devotion to the Holy 
Guardian Angels. A saint to whom he was par- 
ticularly attached was like himself a teacher-saint, 
St. Cassian or Cassianus, who is one of the characters 
in Cardinal Wiseman's novel, "'Fabiola." 

When we read of the many schools founded by 
St. de la Salle, of the success with which he formed 
his teachers, of the numerous improvements which 
he introduced in educational work, of the great 
good he performed in the world, we may well wonder 
how he managed to do so much and to do it so 
thoroughly and well. The secret of his success is his 
holiness of life. The roots of the tree he planted and 
made to grow so tall and straight were his Christian 
virtues. He was able to work manfully for the 
Church and for the state, for the salvation of souls 
and for the spread of learning, because he was a 
superb athlete of God. 



CHAPTER XVI 
PICTURES IN LITTLE 

The Saint's Personal Appearance 

ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE was a man 
somewhat above the middle height, with lofty 
forehead and bright blue eyes. His complexion, fair 
in his youth, had become almost swarthy in conse- 
quence of his exposure to all kinds of weather in the 
course of his long and frequent journeys on foot 
through all parts of France. His abundant brown 
hair had turned prematurely white. His nose was 
long and regular; his mouth well shaped, the lips 
full and slightly prominent and habitually shaped 
into a kindly smile. His bearing was at once dignified 
and graceful. His health had been delicate in his 
youth, but his regular life and his force of will con- 
tributed to give him a vigorous constitution. During 
his last years he suffered intensely from a sore on his 
knee on which some of the ablest surgeons of Paris 
and Rouen exercised their skill in vain. 

Sometimes we get the notion that the saints in 
daily life resembled the saints we see depicted in 
stained-glass windows and in idealized holy pictures. 
We think of them as men who always had the whites 
of their eyes turned upward and who had faces that 
absolutely could not ripple into smiles. This impres- 
sion is very misleading, notably so in the case of the 

119 



120 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. 
Everything in the personal appearance of St. de la 
Salle was gentle and peaceful, because his soul was 
always in union with God; but everything was 
likewise winning and attractive. He had the alert- 
ness and vigor of the true teacher, and the personal 
magnetism always found in leaders of men. He 
inspired love, not fear; and both Brothers and boys 
were always glad to go to him with their doubts 
and troubles and dijQBculties. 

His Rules of Life 

Earnest and thoughtful men, especially the saints, 
have often drawn up rules for their own guidance, 
rules which enable them to utilize their time and 
perform their duties to God and man with thorough- 
ness and care. This practice was followed by St. 
John Baptist de la Salle, and the rules which he drew 
up for his own direction afiford us an opportunity 
of learning much about his attention to daily duties 
and about the spirit of faith which animated all his 
actions. Here are some of them: 

"I will daily spend a quarter of an hour in renewing 
my consecration to the Most Holy Trinity. 

"I must be convinced that in performing faithfully 
the duties of my state in life I am most surely pleasing 
God and securing my own salvation. 

*'When visiting any one I will be careful to speak 
only of what is necessary and not engage in mere 
worldly gossip. 

*' During the day I will at least twenty times unite 



PICTURES IN LITTLE 121 

my actions with those of Our Blessed Lord, and I will 
try to share His views and intentions in performing 
them. 

*'When the Brothers come to me for advice, I will 
ask Our Blessed Lord to speak to them through me. 

"Should anybody cause me pain, I will be careful 
to keep silence. 

"'I must be careful not to lose time; great watch- 
fulness alone will help me in this matter. 

"It is a good rule to be less solicitous to know what 
we are to do than to do perfectly what we know 
should be done. 

"In the morning I will take a quarter of an hour to 
plan the work of the day and to foresee my possible 
failures in order to prevent them. 

"I must not pass a single day without visiting the 
Most Blessed Sacrament. When traveling, I will 
make it a point to visit the church in every village 
through which I may pass." 

The Bishop's Cloak 

Loving poverty, a virtue especially dear to Our 
Lord, St. de la Salle, though always scrupulously 
clean and neat, habitually wore clothes that gave 
evidence of age and usage. One cold day, when he 
had been asked to dinner by a certain bishop, the 
cloak he wore was so thin that the prelate insisted 
on his accepting a new warm one. The saint pre- 
ferred to keep the old cloak, but he was too much of 
a gentleman and too much of a saint to refuse a 
present from his ecclesiastical superior. Shortly 
afterward, however, while he was wearing th^ 



122 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

bishop's gift, he was attacked by two robbers who 
took the cloak away from him. The saint was 
inwardly delighted that he was thus given an oppor- 
tunity of practising poverty, and his only comment 
on the episode was the exclamation that in good 
fortune and in bad fortune invariably fell from his 
lips: ^^God be blessed!" 

On another occasion he was again attacked by 
robbers who proceeded to divest him of his cloak 
and soutane. But when they saw how thin and poor 
his clothing was, they had not the heart to take 
anything from him and allowed him to go peacefully 

on his way. 

In the Snow Ravine 

On one of his journeys, shortly after he had 
organized his teachers at Reims, St. de la Salle lost 
his way in a blinding snowstorm. In his efforts to 
find the road, he fell into a deep ravine of snow, and 
there, stunned and almost frozen to death, he lay 
during most of the night. Time and time again he 
tried to climb out of the ravine, but the loose snow 
gave him no foothold and he always slid back to the 
bottom of the ditch. Finally, he offered a fervent 
prayer for God's assistance, and then, making one 
more effort, he succeeded in clambering to the brink 
of the ravine and in locating the country road. As he 
proceeded on his way he earnestly gave thanks to 
God for this almost miraculous rescue. 

The Priest in the Bastile 

We have all heard stories of the Bastile, that grim 
prison where men were often confined on mere sus- 



PICTURES IN LITTLE 123 

picion and where the dungeons were cold and dark 
and gloomy. It happened that one day a message 
came from the Bastile to St. de la Salle. One of the 
prisoners, an unfortunate priest, asked him to come 
and hear his confession. The saint gladly consented; 
and the sight of the prisoner drew tears from his eyes. 
The poor priest had been totally neglected for several 
years. He was half starved, his soutane was falling 
into shreds, his undergarments were torn and filthy 
and he was covered from head to foot with vermin. 
The cell was disgustingly dirty and ill-smelling. 
St. de la Salle warmly embraced the abject prisoner, 
after which he heard his confession, listened to the 
story of his sorrow and offered him all the consolation 
he could. As he was leaving, an heroic idea suddenly 
occurred to him. 

"'Here," he said to the prisoner, *'y^^ take my 
clothes and give me yours." 

The poor prisoner could hardly believe his ears, 
but St. de la Salle persisted in making the exchange; 
and a few minutes later he walked smiling out of the 
Bastile, gladly wearing the prisoner's filthy and 
ragged clothes. A great joy filled his heart; and we 
may be sure that the words of Our Lord sang them- 
selves in his memory: "'I was in prison and you 
visited Me, I was naked and you covered Me." 



''The Wisdom of the FooV 

Early in the history of the Institute, St. de la Salle 
succeeded in interesting the Duke of Mazarin in 
the work of establishing free schools. One day the 



124 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

saint and the duke called upon a bishop to secure 
permission to open schools in the diocese. They 
pleaded their cause with much eloquence, but they 
failed to make much of an impression on the prelate. 

"'Nonsense!'' exclaimed the bishop. "You are 
two fools." 

"Oh, no, your Lordship," said St. de la Salle 
gently. " Only one." 



The Saint and the Scotchman 

Although St. de la Salle prayed much and thought 
much while traveling, he was invariably courteous 
and companionable in his attitude toward his fellow- 
travelers. One day on the road to Soissons he fell in 
with a young man, a native of Scotland, who intended 
to make his fortune in Paris. They had great diffi- 
culty in conversing at first, for the saint could not 
speak English and the stranger had only a slight 
knowledge of French. The Scotchman understood 
a little Latin, however; and so, speaking in a strange 
jumble of three languages, the two travelers man- 
aged to exchange ideas. The saint learned that the 
young man was a Calvinist who had been brought 
up in the midst of strong anti-Catholic prejudices 
and who had the most horrible and ridiculous 
notions about confession and other doctrines of the 
Catholic Church. 

St. de la Salle had a great zeal for the salvation of 
souls, so he determined to enlighten the mind and 
soften the heart of this well-meaning but misguided 
exile. He paid all the young man's expenses on the 
journey, for the stranger had very little money, and 



PICTURES IN LITTLE 125 

when they came to a city where the Brothers had a 
house, he took his new-found friend with him and 
lodged him comfortably. They had daily conversa- 
tions together, the saint answering the Scotchman's 
questions about the Church and explaining to him 
the essentials of Catholic teaching. The stranger 
was very obstinate in his opinions, but gradually 
his reason was convinced of the falseness of his 
position, and after some three months he eagerly 
sought to be received into the Catholic Church. He 
became a fervent and intelligent Catholic; and 
having returned to Scotland, not only persevered in 
the true faith, but succeeded in bringing into the 
Catholic Church all the members of his family and a 
number of his neighbors. All those conversions were 
made possible by reason of St. de la Salle's kindness 
and charity. 

The Bogus Priest 

On another of his journeys St. de la Salle fell into 
conversation with a man dressed like a priest who, 
before the day was over, confessed to the saint that 
he was really no priest at all, but a degraded criminal 
who had been guilty of the most dreadful sins. 
He had been so hardened in evil-doing that he had 
even presumed to handle the sacred vessels and 
pretend to say Mass. The winning personality of the 
saint was the means chosen by God to bring this 
unfortunate creature to realize the depth of his 
depravity, and the sweet and earnest eloquence of 
the founder of the Brothers persuaded him to repent 
of his sins and resolve to change his manner of life. 



126 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

The saint brought him to Paris and invited him 
to Hve at the Brothers' house. Shortly after, St. de la 
Salle found it necessary to leave the metropolis for a 
while, and on his return he found a state of affairs 
bordering on the ludicrous. The news having leaked 
out that the guest was a clever and dangerous crimi- 
nal, the Brother Director became alarmed at having 
so notorious a person in the establishment, and took 
strenuous measures to keep him from doing mischief. 
He gave orders that the stranger should be locked up 
and carefully watched and guarded; and the entire 
community was very uneasy until the saint returned 
and quieted their fears. 

Then St. de la Salle resumed his care of the unhappy 
soul. The criminal made a general confession and 
was restored to the bosom of the Church. Even then 
the friendship of the saint did not end, for he used 
his influence to secure employment for his convert. 

In Time of Need 

During the first years at Paris the most unhappy 
man in the Brothers' house was the Brother who had 
charge of the kitchen and dining-room, for often the 
community was so poor that it was impossible to 
tell where the next meal was coming from. The poor 
Brother, without provisions and without money, 
would go and tell his troubles to St. de la Salle. The 
saint would counsel him to have patience and trust 
in God; and then, somehow or other, often by what 
looked like a miracle, there would come a present 
of food or money sufficient to tide the community 
over the difficulty. This happened so often that in 



PICTURES IN LITTLE 127 

time the Brothers became used to it — except the 
Brother who had to do the buying and the worrying. 

On one such occasion, with not a penny in the 
house and with not enough food for the next meal, the 
Brother in charge ventured to go to the superior of a 
religious order near by and ask for a little assistance. 
The superior received him coldly, told him that the 
Brothers had no sense in trying to support a com- 
munity without adequate financial means, and that 
the best thing for them to do was to get out of Paris; 
for his part, he would give them no assistance 
whatever. Very downhearted, the poor Brother 
started back home. On the way he picked up a 
package of papers which he brought to St. de la Salle 
to examine. 

"God be blessed!" exclaimed the saint. "It looks 
as though God wants our neighbors to assist us, 
after all." 

The papers proved to be some valuable documents 
belonging to the religious order whose superior had 
been so harsh and uncharitable. The Brother 
retraced his steps, this time bringing the papers, and 
the superior now received him kindly, thanked him 
for restoring the package and immediately sent a 
generous donation of food to the Brothers' house. 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE GATEWAY TO LIFE 

WHENEVER an election is held in one of our 
American cities the candidates for the various 
offices make many speeches and write endless articles 
in the newspapers, all telling the dear public the 
wonderful things they will do if the people have the 
good sense and the good taste to elect them. The 
candidates make it very plain that they want the 
offices, that they are ready to do almost anything in 
order to be elected. The professional politician 
doubtless has virtues of his own, but modesty is not 
one of them. His favorite flower is not the blushing 
violet. 

The saint is in this respect utterly the reverse of 
the politician. The saint does not put himself for- 
ward. He does not seek posts of honor and respon- 
sibility. He fears positions of power and trust, for 
he knows so much about human nature, in himself 
and in others, that he dreads the very real dangers 
inherent in the exercise of authority. He heartily 
agrees with one of the kings in Shakespeare's plays 
that, "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." 

Several times during the course of his life, St. 
de la Salle had tried to relieve himself of the respon- 
sibility of being the superior of the Institute of the 
Christian Schools. But he was so successful in 

guiding the teachers and in conducting the schools 

us 



THE GATEWAY TO LIFE 129 

that his Brothers felt that nobody could take his 
place. In 1717, however, when once more he pleaded 
to abandon the office, the Brothers reluctantly 
acceded to his desire. He was now an old man, his 
arduous life had told on his health, he was suffering 
most of the time from the sore on his knee and from 
severe attacks of rheumatism. He felt that he had 
not much longer to live, and he wanted to spend his 
declining days in preparation for death. Besides, it 
was time that the Institute he had established should, 
so to say, learn to stand on its own feet, that the 
Brothers themselves might conduct its affairs, and 
carry on the work of the schools without the aid of 
the experienced man who had already done so much 
for them. 

All these motives impelled the Brothers to accept 
the resignation of the holy founder and to elect one 
of their number, Brother Bartholomew, in his place. 
This event occurred at the second general chapter of 
the Brothers, held in Rouen in 1717. It was the 
second conclave of the torch-bearers; and the bright 
and unfailing guiding torch, which the saint had 
held aloft for nearly forty years, was passed into other 
hands. Brother Bartholomew was one of the dearest 
friends of the saint, and one of the most fervent and 
self-sacrificing of the Brothers. 

Freed from the cares of office and the numerous 
distractions and annoyances incidental to it, St. John 
Baptist de la Salle turned all his attention to prayer 
and meditation, and to revising the books he had 
written for the Brothers and their pupils. He was 
not a writer in the sense that he had devoted any 



130 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

considerable part of his life to the composition of 
books; but he had found it necessary to write several 
volumes bearing on the life led by the Brothers and 
on the work of the schools. This is a good time to 
consider his written work. 

First of all were the Rules or Constitution of the 
Brothers. Every religious congregation has its rules, 
that is, the laws and directions furnished the members 
for their guidance. No organization can exist without 
rules. That is why we must have rules for a debating 
society, rules for playing baseball, rules for con- 
ducting a school. The Rules of the Brothers were 
written by St. de la Salle after much reflection and 
much prayer and after numerous consultations with 
his disciples. All the rules had been carefully tried in 
practice before being set down in writing; and now, 
after years of experiment, they were embodied in 
permanent form. 

Besides the Rules, St. de la Salle wrote a number 
of meditations on the Sunday Gospels, in which he 
applied Our Lord's teachings to the school and com- 
munity life of the Brothers, and also a book called, 
''Explanation of the Method of Mental Prayer." 
We have seen how highly the saint esteemed the 
practice of mental prayer. In his book he tries 
to make meditation easy and fruitful for his disciples; 
and he shows not only his deep piety but his remark- 
able knowledge of what to-day is called psychology, 
that is, the workings of the human mind. Other 
writings of the saint, dealing with various aspects 
of the religious life, are gathered together in a book 
called, ''Collection of Short Treatises/' 



THE GATEWAY TO LIFE 131 

All the books just mentioned are concerned chiefly 
with the religious side of the life of the Brothers. 
On the educational side he wrote a book which has 
been the admiration of educators for more than two 
centuries, a book to which the English writer, 
Matthew Arnold — whose father was the eminent 
Dr. Arnold of Rugby — has paid a glowing tribute. 
That book is "The Management of the Christian 
Schools." In it the saint outlined his simultaneous 
method of teaching, and set down a large number 
of practical hints for maintaining discipline and for 
teaching the several school subjects. 

For the pupils of the Brothers, St. de la Salle wrote 
several little works, including a set of "Rules of 
Politeness." The saint always maintained that the 
schools of the Brothers should be schools of good 
manners, and in this volume he brings together a 
number of precepts concerning daily actions which 
will help young men to form gentlemanly habits. 
In it he urges them to seek to imitate Our Lord, Who 
was the world's perfect Gentleman. He also wrote 
a book on Christian Doctrine called, "The Duties of a 
Christian." In an interesting and agreeable style he 
discusses the sacraments and the commandments 
and the virtues which Catholics ought to practice. 

In 1719 the illness of St. de la Salle increased. He 
developed an acute case of asthma, and he suffered 
much from an abscess in the head. Far from com- 
plaining, he accepted his pains joyfully, reminding 
himself of what Our Lord had suffered on the cross 
and rejoicing in sharing his Saviour's heavy burden. 
When the doctor told him that he had but a short 



132 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

time to live, the saint calmly said: "'I hope that I 
shall soon be delivered out of Egypt, and be admitted 
into the true Land of Promise." 

That is the way with all the saints. They were 
glad to die. And why.^ Because death was no death 
for them. Worldly people find the thought of death 
a disagreeable thought; they try to banish it from 
their minds. But the saints like to dwell on the 
thought of death, for to them death is not the end 
of everything, but the beginning of everything. The 
day of their death is their real birthday. To them 
death is the gateway to life. 

On the feast of St. Joseph, one of the patrons of the 
Institute, St. de la Salle, who had been for many days 
confined to his bed, was able to arise and offer the 
holy sacrifice of the Mass — a consolation which he 
highly prized. But a relapse came almost imme- 
diately. In Holy Week he was so ill that the Holy 
Viaticum was brought to him. In order to welcome 
his Lord with every outward mark of respect and 
devotion, the saint had himself dressed in soutane 
and surplice, and he received the Holy Communion 
kneeling on the floor of his room. 

That was on Wednesday in Holy Week, April 5. 
The following day. Holy Thursday, he received the 
sacrament of Extreme Unction. On Holy Thursday 
evening the Brothers gathered about his bed, and 
the new superior. Brother Bartholomew, begged the 
dying saint to give them a last word of counsel and 
advice. The holy founder spoke briefly, urging 
them to be faithful to their holy vocation, and to 
avoid the evil influence of the world. A little later 



THE GATEWAY TO LIFE 133 

they all said together the beautiful hymn which 
begins the Brothers' evening prayer, ''Maria, mater 
gratice,'' "Mary, Mother of Grace, sweet Mother of 
Mercy." 

It was an impressive moment. Here were the 
faithful disciples, the men who had vowed their lives 
to the glory of God and the education of youth, kneel- 
ing about the bed of the man who had guided them 
in their lives and in their work. He was their Father 
in God, their model and their inspiration. And 
though tears of honorable human grief filled their 
eyes and choked their voices, they did not sorrow as 
those who have no hope. For the spirit of faith, the 
soul of their Institute, told them that death was 
coming to their saintly founder as a crown of glory 
and a surpassing great reward, that he was entering 
the portals of heavenly happiness, that in his case 
truly death was the gateway to life. 

A little later, in response to a question put by 
Brother Bartholomew, the saint uttered the last 
words he ever spoke this side of the eternal gateway. 
Those words were: "I adore in all things the will 
of God in my re'gard." Such were the sentiments 
that had guided him through all the labors and trials 
of his well-filled life. 

At four o'clock in the morning, the saint's face 
suddenly brightened and his habitual smile glowed 
upon his countenance. He looked fixedly and joy- 
ously for a moment into space, made an attempt to 
rise, joined his hands and lifted his eyes to heaven. 
In that posture he calmly breathed his last. It was 
Good Friday, April 7, 1719. 



134 ST. JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE 

The news of his death spread quickly through 
Rouen and through France, and the words that 
came spontaneously to thousands of lips were these: 
^'The saint is dead! The saint is dead!'' Members 
of the aristocracy jostled with tradesmen and beggars 
in order to be present at his funeral; and as his body 
was borne through the streets of Rouen on the 
shoulders of his Brothers, the prayers and tears of 
the people whom he had so deeply benefited and 
for whose education he had so valiantly labored 
followed after like a cloud of incense. His remains, 
first interred at Rouen, now repose in the mother 
house of the Institute at Lembecq-lez-Hal, in Belgium. 

St. John Baptist de la Salle was canonized by 
Pope Leo XIII in 1900, and his feast day. May 15, 
is observed throughout the entire Catholic world. 
In the formal decree of canonization, the illustrious 
pontiff uttered a sentiment with which this little 
story of St. John Baptist de la Salle may most 
fittingly close: 

"Benediction, glory, and thanksgiving to Jesus 
Christ, God and Redeemer of the human race, who 
hath clothed His faithful servant, John Baptist de 
la Salle, with the splendor of His glory, and who, 
knowing our needs, has proposed him to us as a 
model, in order that we may the better know the 
supereminent charity of Jesus Christ which surpasses 
all knowledge, and be filled unto the fulness of God." 



THE GATEWAY TO LIFE 135 

THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 

Each year, on the fifteenth of May, the CathoKc 
Church keeps the feast day of St. John Baptist de la 
Salle, and during the Mass, priests everywhere 
throughout the world read the following beautiful 
prayer: 

"O God, who didst raise up St. John Baptist, 
Confessor, to give a Christian education to the needy, 
to guide young men in the pathway of truth and to 
form anew a family in Thy Church, graciously grant 
unto us that through his prayers and example we 
may be fervent in zeal for Thy glory in saving souls 
and grow worthy to share his crown in heaven." 



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